The Souliot Women

When the Paris Salon opened in November 1827, France had just helped destroy an Ottoman fleet at Navarino, in support of the Greeks fighting for independence, and Greece was the cause of the day. Ary Scheffer arrived with this enormous canvas, more than three and a half metres wide. Its story was already 24 years old. In 1803 the people of Souli, a mountain district in Epirus, were overrun by the troops of Ali Pasha, the Ottoman ruler of Ioannina. Their women, seeing the men defeated, chose to throw themselves from the rocks rather than be taken, and Scheffer gathers them at the edge of the cliff. The painting was bought from the artist the following May for 4,000 francs, and it hung in the Luxembourg museum in Paris until 1873.