Géricault’s preliminary sketch of a hanging was the most original of all his works in London, though it has been little discussed. Its depiction of the Cato Street executions still passes unrecognised. This chapter proves that these were indeed its subject. More widely, for the first time in art history it shows a hanging without making the execution stand for something other than itself – sharing kinship in this with Goya’s Third of May 1808 (though that work was unknown to Géricault). Géricault’s unflinching pity may anticipate our own.