Episode from the Greek War of Independence

In 1856, the year Delacroix painted this, French and British troops were sitting in Piraeus, the port of Athens. They had landed in April 1854 to force a neutral Greece out of the Crimean War, and stayed until February 1857. The war in the picture was a generation older than that. A Greek horseman in a white foustanella rides across the field with an Ottoman fighter dead behind him, the subject Delacroix had taken up in the 1820s, when the revolt was news in Paris and philhellene feeling ran high. He came back to it here at 58. The museum's own description lingers on the costume, the black sash, the embroidered waistcoat, the green cape lined with red silk lifting in the same movement as the headscarf. The Greek state bought the canvas later with the help of two shipowners, Vassilis Goulandris and Stavros Niarchos.