The Booty

Paris already knew this subject before Ralli touched it. The painter Delacroix had shown the massacres on the island of Chios at the Salon of 1824, and for French audiences the captive Greek woman stayed a recognisable kind of picture for the rest of the century. Ralli sent his version to the Salon of 1906, and the gallery dates the canvas to before that year.

What he painted is the aftermath. The scene is an Orthodox church, in front of the doors of the sanctuary, with the silver and the books of the liturgy pulled out and left across the floor and a young Greek woman tied to a bench among them. The gallery's own commentary points at the precision of French academic training, worked with an eye seriously schooled by photography, and at the colour, which is brown almost throughout apart from the red belt she is wearing.

The canvas is 133 by 100 centimetres and belongs to the Koutlidis Foundation collection, shown in the National Gallery's main building. In the autumn of 2021 it went back to Paris, to the Louvre, for an exhibition about how modern Greece was pictured between 1675 and 1919.