The French proverb une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps, or its English equivalent one swallow doesn’t make a summer, applied only too well to success at the Salon. Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) knew this from his ailing friend and mentor Théodore Géricault and his masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa. For Delacroix to make real impact, he had to follow his recognition at the Salon of 1822 with further success at the next in 1824.
He had decided in 1823 that his primary submission was to be scenes from the recent Massacre of Chios, in the Greek War of Independence, and started making figure studies for that.
Among those is this Young Orphan Girl in a Cemetery (above) painted in February 1824, and Head of a Woman (below) in April 1824, both of which he submitted to the Salon alongside his main work.
The island of Chios is very close to the Turkish mainland, and was at the time a relatively independent part of the Ottoman Empire, with flourishing trade mainly with Turkey. When the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule was growing in early 1822, hundreds of armed Greeks from the neighbouring island of Samos landed on Chios and attacked Ottoman forces there. On 22 March an Ottoman naval force arrived and started to systematically destroy the island and its inhabitants.
With later reinforcements swelling their numbers to thirty thousand, those troops killed a total of 25,000 and enslaved 45,000 of the 110,000 inhabitants of Chios. An additional ten thousand Greeks fled before the massacre ended in August. There was outrage across Europe as a result.
Delacroix’s huge painting of The Massacre at Chios (1824) ranks alongside Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa in its importance, both in terms of its contemporary impact and enduring influence. He completed it in a period of six months, during which he was also distracted by other work, including both the studies above.
Thirteen men, women and children have been rounded up by Ottoman soldiers for slaughter or removal as slaves. Behind them are other groups being treated similarly, and a great pall of smoke from a burning town. Its figures are bunched into two pyramids of human suffering, their faces ranging through pleading, anguish and despair, to acceptance of imminent death. Some make their last farewells to their loved ones, other look up in fear of what will happen next.
Although few of the critics praised Delacroix or the painting, it had great impact at the Salon, and was purchased by the State for the handsome sum of six thousand francs, for exhibition among leading contemporary art in the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. It also focussed attention on the plight of the Greeks in their fight for independence.
The Massacre at Chios remains unusual among history paintings for its highly contemporary theme: Delacroix completed and exhibited this at only his second Salon, just two years after the event, making it almost a work of reportage. In this he had succeeded where others like Benjamin West had failed.
The same year, Delacroix’s friend and mentor Théodore Géricault died.
Over the next two years, Delacroix explored other forms of narrative painting.
He painted A Mortally Wounded Brigand Quenches His Thirst in about 1825, but it wasn’t shown until the Salon of 1827-28. Set in a similarly bleak landscape, this brigand is bleeding into the water he’s trying to drink. This is so painterly as to be almost an oil sketch.
Louis d’Orléans Showing his Mistress (1825-26) is a complete contrast: a sordid story of misogyny from French history. Set in about 1400, it shows Louis I, Duke of Orléans, brother of King Charles VI, at the right, displaying the legs and lower body of his mistress, Mariette d’Enghien, to his chamberlain. Her face is obscured because the mistress also happens to be the chamberlain’s wife. This painting was clearly intended for a private collection.
Delacroix continued his literary narratives with this initial version of Tam O’ Shanter in 1825. This is based on the poem of the same name written by the Scot Robert ‘Robbie’ Burns in 1790, telling of a man who was riding his horse home from a drinking session, as a storm was brewing. He came across a witches’ sabbath, and fled from it with some of the witches in hot pursuit. He headed for a river, which he knew the witches couldn’t cross, and this painting shows his pursuers, on the right, holding the tail of his horse as they approach the river and safety.
The name Tam O’ Shanter has since been applied to the characteristic Scottish woollen bonnet.
Delacroix also developed a fascination for the ‘Oriental’, expressed in around 1825 in this view of a Turk Seated on a Sofa Smoking.
In the summer of 1825, he visited London, and became friends with the British painter Richard Parkes Bonington. When the latter needed a studio in Paris for the winter of 1825-26, Delacroix shared his.
He visited tales of chivalry in Combat Between Two Horsemen in Armour, painted at some time between 1825-30.
He was inspired by Lord Byron’s poem The Giaour, written in 1810-11, to paint The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan in 1826. The name Giaour is based on the Turkish word for infidel, and Byron’s poem describes the revenge killing of Hassan by the Giaour for killing the latter’s lover. After their deadly combat, the Giaour is filled with remorse and retreats into a monastery. This painting was rejected by the Salon of 1827, but Delacroix painted several later versions.
While Delacroix explored those and other narratives, the Greek War of Independence ground on. The town of Missolonghi, in the west of mainland Greece, had been unsuccessfully attacked by Ottoman forces in 1822 and 1823. In April 1825, a third attempt was made with a stronger force and naval support, sustained until Ottoman victory and the inevitable massacre of Greeks in April 1826. To add to Delacroix’s emotional involvement, Lord Byron had died in the town in 1824.
Delacroix prepared his second major painting of the war with deliberation, in a series of sketches and studies centred on a young woman as the personification of Greece. Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi relies on subtle allusion rather than the harsh realities of The Massacre at Chios, making it a forerunner of his later and most popular painting, Liberty Leading the People.
Although clearly intended for a public collection, reaction was muted, and it was never submitted to a Salon, and failed to find a buyer until 1851. Despite that, Delacroix’s two paintings of the Greek War of Independence were of importance. In 1827, the great powers of Russia, Britain and France intervened, defeated the Ottoman navy at Navarino, hostilities ended in September 1829, and Greece attained independence in 1830.
However, Delacroix was about to make himself unwelcome.
References
Barthélémy Jobert (2018) Delacroix, new and expanded edn, Princeton UP. ISBN 978 0 691 18236 0.
Patrick Noon and Christopher Riopelle (2015) Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art, National Gallery and Yale UP. ISBN 978 1 857 09575 3.
Lucy Norton (translator) (1995) The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, 3rd edn, Phaedon. ISBN 978 0 7148 3359 0.
Arlette Sérullaz (2004) Delacroix, Louvre Drawing Gallery, 5 Continents. ISBN 978 8 874 39105 9.
Beth S Wright (editor) (2001) The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 65077 1.