Griechische Reiter ruhen im Wald

Delacroix made his name on the Greek revolt. He showed the Massacre at Chios in 1824 and, two years later, a painting of Greece mourning over the ruins of Missolonghi, at a moment when Paris was full of committees raising money for the Greeks against Ottoman rule. This small canvas comes more than 30 years after that. By 1858 Greece had been an independent kingdom for a quarter of a century under a Bavarian-born king, and the cause had long since stopped being news. Delacroix was 60, often ill, and spending what strength he had on the chapel he was decorating at Saint-Sulpice in Paris. He painted the horsemen halted in a wood, one still mounted on a white horse and two down on the ground, doing nothing in particular. He never went to Greece. The eastern material in his pictures came from six months in Morocco and Algeria in 1832.