Deux études de costumes souliotes

In 1822 the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule was a year old, Paris was following it in the papers, and Delacroix, 24, had just made his Salon debut with the Barque of Dante. This canvas was not painted in Greece. The painter Jules-Robert Auguste kept a studio in Paris stocked with eastern robes, sashes and weapons, and the young Romantics borrowed from it constantly. What Delacroix works through here is the dress of the Souliotes, the Albanian-speaking highlanders of Epirus whose long fight against Ali Pasha of Ioannina had already made them famous across Europe. The same costume, studied twice over on one canvas. Raymond Koechlin and his wife left the picture to the Louvre in 1931, and it hangs now in Room 942 of the Sully wing, among the Delacroix.