The Massacre at Chios
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| Eugene Delacroix, Massacre at Chios, 1824 |
In 1822 the Turkish Sultan designated his army for the small island. Nearly 20,000 people of the island of Chios were massacred. Citizens were hanged, butchered, starved, and tortured; women and children were raped and enslaved and sent to North Africa.
Such suffering provides a rich source material for a Romantic painter. Delacroix interviewed an eyewitness, Colonel Vautier, to make sure he painted an exact scene from the horror. Another name for The Massacres at Chios, Scene from the Massacres at Chios: Greek Families Awaiting Death or Slavery, etc.--See Various Accounts and Contemporary Newspapers, shows Delacroix's drive for utmost accuracy. Some art historians, however, battle against this false notion of complete accuracy.
Delacroix did many studies on items such as exotic costumes in Paris and Persian miniatures to create an Arabian Nights feel. The Persian miniatures, from which Delacroix borrowed the lighting, made their faces somewhat "flat and brilliant."
Many, including Ingres of course, would call Delacroix's Massacre an "assault on the great traditions of history painting." His painting, lacking a centralized hero, creates two ideas of desolate and tortured scenery, but it seems spread out and disjointed. Through all this supposed fiction, the truth which Delacroix hoped the public would see comes through.
Families and individuals lay crowded alongside each other, starved and depleted. A woman chained across the soldier's horse indicates her future sexual enslavement, and a child on the ground clings to her dead mother, hoping to be fed. Even though Delacroix might have romanticized the scene as always, he successfully portrayed the "contemporary barbarism."
For a brief moment in history, Eastern and foreign paintings dominated historical painting. Right before putting The Massacre of Chios on display, Delacroix revised his painting at the last moment to mimic the "vibrant, flecked surfaces" of other paintings done by Constable.
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