Blowing from Guns in British India

Blowing from Guns in British India is an oil on canvas painting completed around 1884 by the Russian painter Vasily Vereshchagin, part of a trilogy on capital punishment he titled Eye for Eye, Tooth for Tooth. It depicts the execution of Namdhari Sikhs by being blown from the mouth of a cannon, carried out in January 1872 at Malerkotla by Deputy Commissioner J. L. Cowan following an attack on Malodh fort and a nearby slaughterhouse. When exhibited in the 1880s, many viewers assumed the painting depicted the executions of Indian soldiers after the 1857 rebellion, a misconception Vereshchagin never corrected even though some contemporary newspapers identified the actual subject. The painting toured the United States and was later purchased at a New York auction and donated by the collector Phoebe A. Hearst to the University of California, Berkeley's museum of anthropology, where it appears to have been destroyed by water damage around 1950; its current whereabouts, if it survives, are unknown. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/