Scenes from the Massacres of Chios
Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) · 1824
In April 1822 Ottoman troops killed or enslaved most of the population of the Greek island of Chios in reprisal for the Greek uprising. News of it swept European opinion, and Delacroix, then twenty-five, chose the aftermath rather than the fighting. Greek families sit and lie in a foreground strip, waiting. Nobody resists. A mounted Ottoman soldier on the right drags a naked woman behind his horse; at his feet an infant still tries to feed at the breast of its dead mother.
The composition deliberately refuses a hero and a centre. Figures are pushed to the edges and the middle opens onto a pale, smoky landscape where the village burns and distant columns of troops move off. That emptiness in the middle is the shock of the picture. Delacroix repainted the background after seeing John Constable's Hay Wain in Paris, loosening his handling and brightening the tonality, and the difference between the broken, luminous distance and the more sculptural foreground bodies is still visible. Note the turquoise and rose of the fabrics against grey and ash.
Shown at the Salon of 1824, it was bought by the state for 6,000 francs even though the older painter Antoine-Jean Gros, who had championed Delacroix, called it the massacre of painting. It became a rallying image for European philhellenism alongside Byron's death at Missolonghi that same year. Delacroix had not yet travelled beyond France when he painted it; his Morocco journey came nine years later. Compare the loose, fluid touch here with the tight finish of David across the room and the gap between two generations becomes obvious.
Did You Know? Delacroix repainted the entire background after seeing Constable's landscapes in Paris, only days before the Salon opened.
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