The Nineteenth of April 1775

At first light on 19 April 1775, some seventy Lexington militiamen under Captain John Parker stood on the town common as the advance guard of a British column seven hundred strong came up the road from Boston, bound for the military stores at Concord. Parker ordered his men to disperse. Someone fired, and no one has ever proved who; the regulars loosed a volley and charged with the bayonet. Eight Lexington men were killed and ten wounded. By nightfall the column had been driven back to Charlestown under fire, and the war had begun.

Goya painted The Third of May 1808 in 1814; it hangs in the Prado in Madrid. It shows French soldiers executing Spanish prisoners on a hill outside the city, and it broke every rule of battle painting: the firing squad is a faceless machine of backs and barrels, the victim is a man in a white shirt with arms flung wide, and the light comes from a lantern on the ground between them.

The regulars stand where Goya's firing squad stood, a red-coated line at the right seen from behind, muskets leveled, smoke rolling off the discharge. A militiaman in a white shirt and buff breeches faces them with his arms thrown open, his musket dropped in the grass, while the men around him turn to run or crouch. Two of the dead lie in the foreground beside a fallen hat. A lantern burns at his feet, the meetinghouse rises dark at the left, and a band of dawn shows behind the rooftops.

Goya painted an execution, not a battle. What happened on Lexington Green that morning was nearer the first, and the borrowing holds.