Cabeça de mulher

In April 1822 Ottoman troops killed or enslaved much of the Greek population of the island of Chios, and reports of it swept through Europe and hardened opinion behind the Greek struggle for independence. The young Delacroix answered with an enormous canvas of the survivors, shown at the Paris Salon of 1824. This is a study for one of the faces in it, a woman painted close up, her expression caught somewhere between fear and grief. Delacroix worked such heads from live models before fitting them into the crowd of the finished scene. The great painting now hangs in the Louvre. This single head went instead to the museum at Orleans.