British occupiers captured the French military leader Joan of Arc in 1430 and executed her a year later in a public burning at the stake. She was nineteen years old. Rodin depicts the scene in this study for a monument to the teenage hero.

The details of the monument commission are unknown. Rodin evidently selected the subject himself, choosing her extreme anguish in martyrdom over a more conventional scene of military triumph like the one depicted in Emmanuel Frémiet’s Joan of Arc.