Das Massaker von Chios

In 1822 Ottoman forces answered a Greek uprising on the island of Chios by killing tens of thousands of its inhabitants and enslaving tens of thousands more. The news travelled through Europe while the Greek war of independence was still a live cause, and Delacroix, who had no commission, decided to paint it. What he showed at the Paris Salon in 1824 was not the killing itself but the exhausted aftermath. Greek families sit in the foreground waiting to be taken, wounded, resigned, while a mounted Ottoman soldier drags a naked woman behind his horse on the right. Critics at the time were unsettled that Delacroix gave the suffering no clear hero and no rescue. He reworked the sky and background late, after seeing the fresh, bright colour in canvases by the English painter Constable hanging at the same Salon.