Massacre at Chios

French writer Stendahl (Henri Beyle)  evaluated Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios when he saw it at the 1824 Salon:

“With the best will in the world, I can’t admire M. Delacroix and his Massacre at Chios. This work always makes me think of a picture originally intended to represent a plague, which the artist then turned into a Massacre at Chios after reading the newspaper reports. All I can see in the large, living corpse in the middle of the picture is an unfortunate victim of the plague who tried to remove the deadly tumor himself; that, at any rate, is what the blood on the character’s left flank suggests. Another incident which all young art-students infallibly put in their pictures of plagues is a child trying to suck from the breast of its dead mother; there it is in M. Delacroix’s picture, in the right-hand corner. A Massacre must have an executioner and a victim. There ought to have been a fanatical Turk, as handsome as M. Girodet’s as they sacrifice divinely beautiful Greek women and threaten the aged father before he falls after his daughters, the next victim to their blows. …
Two days ago the Journal des Débats claimed that the Massacre at Chios is Shakespearian poetry. I feel that if this picture is only mediocre it is because it errs on the side of excess and not insignificance…”

Reprinted in David Wakefield, ed., Stendahl and the Arts (New York: Phaidon, 1973),  pp. 114-15.

An anonymous contemporary critic writing in Le Mercure du Dix-Neuvieme Siecle (vol. 7, 1824) recorded his response to Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios :

“I felt repulsed, not by the horrors of the subject, but by the hideous aspect of the painting….Cadavers already marked by the imprint of destruction and the livid color which announce the second stage of death busy disfiguring them; living bodies which resemble the cadavers, a poor even degraded nature….faces either burned by the sun like Africans, or soiled, with that species of color, dirty, yellowed, and somber resulting from old age, suffering, and above all long-accustomed distress….Why does he give it an even more hideous air with those clashing touches of a brush that heaps colors one next to another, without uniting them or establishing any harmonious relation among them?”

Cited in Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 275.

Lee Johnson considers Delacroix’s debt to Gros’s Pesthouse at Jaffa (1804):

“Charles Blanc states (1864) that the Massacres de Scio was conceived under the influence of the Plague at Jaffa, Alexandre Dumas (1864) that Delacroix told him the first idea for it came to him in fron of Gros’s picture. Though neither statement should perhaps be taken literally, there can be no doubt that Gros’s painting, first shown at the Salon of 1804, was the most important contemporary precedent for a Near-Eastern scene of suffering of this kind, treated on a grand scale and with some feeling for the sensuous painterly qualities of the medium, for sunshine and the luster of exotic costume. The more the pity that Gros should have so far renounced the implications of his own early creative gifts as to disapproved of Delacroix’s picture and, if Alexandre Dumas is to be believed…denounce it as the ‘massacre of painting.’’

Johnson also notes that contemporaries considered the painting path-breaking:

“From the moment it was hung at the Salon…the Massacres de Scio was interpreted as making a new departure, as posing a threat to the accepted standards of the neo-classical school, and Delacroix himself looked back on it as marking the point where, he supposed, ‘I began to become an object of antipathy for the academy and a kind of nuisance...For the first time a painting was labeled romantic in contrast to the classicism of David: [art critic] Chauvin…after arguing that the classicist satisfies both heart and mind by drawing on ‘la belle nature’ [beautiful nature] whereas the romantic ‘has an unknown kind of power, outside of nature, that shocks at the very first glance,’ concluded ‘I label [David’s] Léonidas classical and Massacre de Scio romantic.’”

Lee Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix. A Critical Catalogue. 1816-1831, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1981, p. 87.