Orphan Girl at the Cemetery

Delacroix painted this around 1824, the same year he was finishing a huge canvas about a real and recent horror, the Ottoman massacre of the Greek population on the island of Chios. This young woman, bare-shouldered in a graveyard, her eyes turned up and wet, seems to be a study he made while working toward that larger scene. A similar figure appears at its left edge. On her own, though, she reads as something quieter and stranger. There is no clear story around her, only a name and a mood, and the background dissolves into loose grey so that all the finish goes into her face and that anxious upward glance. Her lips are parted as if she has just heard something off to the side.