Editing Eugène Delacroix (section)

===''Chios'' and ''Missolonghi''===
[[Image:Scène des massacres de Scio.jpg|thumb|''[[The Massacre at Chios]]'' (1824)]]
Delacroix's painting of [[Chios Massacre]] during the [[Greek civil wars of 1823–1825]] shows dying Greek civilians rounded up for [[enslavement]] by the [[Ottoman Empire]].<ref>{{cite book | author1= Axel Körner |title=America in Italy: The United States in the Political Thought and Imagination of the Risorgimento, 1763–1865 |publisher=  Princeton University Press |year=2017 |pages=44–45 |isbn=9781400887811 }}</ref> This is one of several paintings he made of contemporary events, expressing the official policy for the Greek cause in [[Greek War of Independence]] against the Turks, the English, the Russians, and the French governments. Delacroix was quickly recognized by the authorities as a leading painter in the new Romantic style, and the picture was bought by the state. His depiction of suffering was controversial, however, as there was no glorious event taking place, no patriots raising their swords in valour as in [[Jacques-Louis David|David's]] ''[[Oath of the Horatii]]'', only a disaster. Many critics deplored the painting's despairing tone; the artist [[Antoine-Jean Gros]] called it "a massacre of art".<ref name="wellington_xii" />

The pathos in the depiction of an infant clutching its dead mother had an especially powerful effect, although this detail was condemned as unfit for art by Delacroix's critics. A viewing of the paintings of [[John Constable]] and the watercolour sketches and art of [[Richard Parkes Bonnington]] prompted Delacroix to make extensive, freely painted changes to the sky and distant landscape.<ref>Wellington, pp. xii, 16.</ref>

[[Image:Eugène Ferdinand Victor Delacroix 017.jpg|right|thumb|upright|''[[Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi]]'' (1826), [[Musée des beaux-arts de Bordeaux]]]]
Delacroix produced a second painting in support of the Greeks in their war for independence, this time referring to the capture of [[Missolonghi]] by Turkish forces in 1825.<ref>Jobert, p. 127.</ref> With a restraint of palette appropriate to the allegory, ''Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi'' displays a woman in Greek costume with her breast bared, arms half-raised in an imploring gesture before the horrible scene: the suicide of the Greeks, who chose to kill themselves and destroy their city rather than surrender to the Turks. A hand is seen at the bottom, the body having been crushed by rubble. The painting serves as a monument to the people of Missolonghi and to the idea of freedom against tyrannical rule. This event interested Delacroix not only for his sympathies with the Greeks, but also because the poet [[George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron|Byron]], whom Delacroix greatly admired, had died there.<ref name="Noon58" />