Combat du Giaour et Hassan

In 1824 Delacroix sat reading Byron's poem The Giaour and noted it in his journal. Byron had died that same year at Missolonghi, where he had gone to fight for the Greeks against Ottoman rule, and across Europe sympathy for that revolt was running high. Delacroix caught the fever too. This small canvas from 1826 shows the poem's climax: the Giaour, a Venetian, and the Turkish lord Hassan locked together on rearing horses in a gorge, daggers out, after Hassan had put to death the woman they both loved. Delacroix had not travelled to Greece or the East when he painted it, so the setting comes from Byron's lines and his own imagination. He would reach North Africa only years later, in 1832.