The Massacre at Chios

Greek families slumped on the ground, a baby reaching for a dead mother, a rider dragging a bound woman away, and behind them a burning island. Delacroix's canvas of more than four metres offers no hero and almost no hope.

The story behind the painting

From 12 April 1822 and for months into that summer, Ottoman forces attacked the inhabitants of the Aegean island of Chios. About twenty thousand people were killed, and almost all of the surviving seventy thousand were deported into slavery. On 15 September 1821 the young, still unknown Delacroix had written to his friend Raymond Soulier that he wanted to make his name with a scene from the Greek War of Independence shown at the Salon. He painted Dante and Virgil in Hell first, but as it was unveiled in April 1822 the atrocities on Chios were under way. In May 1823 he committed to this subject.

What to look for

Thirteen civilians, men, women and children, have been rounded up for slaughter or slavery, laid out almost flat across the foreground. They form two human pyramids. On the left, rising to a man in a red fez, the wounded sit in despondent resignation; the dying man at the front stares emptily. On the right, a writhing woman tied to a horse and the twisting soldier above her give a violent upward thrust. At the foot of that group an old woman lifts her eyes to the sky, and a baby seeks comfort from a dead mother. Behind them, smoke, burning villages and scorched earth dissolve into drifting bands of colour.

Meaning and intent

Unusually for a picture of civil ruin at the time, there is no heroic figure to balance the crushed victims. The vigour of the aggressor against the dismal rendering of the victims has drawn comment since the first showing, and some critics charged that Delacroix seemed to sympathise with the occupiers. He had modelled for Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, and borrowed its pyramidal grouping. He wrote that one must fill up: if it is less natural, it will be more beautiful. Antoine-Jean Gros, whose Plague of Jaffa Delacroix had drawn on, called it the massacre of painting; Ingres saw in it the fever and epilepsy of modern art.

Legacy

At the Salon that opened on 25 August 1824 it hung as no. 450, in the same room as Ingres's The Vow of Louis XIII, the start of the public rivalry between the two painters. Alexandre Dumas reported crowds of painters arguing in front of it. The state bought it that year for the Musée du Luxembourg, an irregular purchase made by the Comte de Forbin without the King's formal approval. In November 1874 it went to the Louvre. In Greece, a studio version made under Delacroix's supervision hangs in the Athens War Museum, and a copy on Chios was withdrawn in 2009, then returned after press protests.