Study of two Greeks
stamped with initials 'E.D' (lower left)
watercolour and bodycolour heightened with gum arabic and gold paint
13 x 12cm (5 1/8 x 4 3/4in).
Executed circa 1823-1824

Footnotes

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Brame and Lorenceau. It will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Numérique of Eugène Delacroix, currently in preparation.

Provenance
Private collection, Switzerland.

The present lot was painted at a time when Delacroix, like many of his contemporaries, was fascinated by the plight of the Greeks, trying to liberate themselves from the grip of the Ottoman Empire. As Sébastien Allard & Côme Fabre note, the Greek War of Independence 'was on everyone's mind, and young people, following the example of the British poet-adventurer Lord Byron, were caught up in philhellenic enthusiasm'.

The subject preoccupied much of Delacroix's work in the early 1820s - when the present lot was painted - culminating in his major Salon exhibit of 1824, Scenes from the Massacres at Chios, a vast painting which Delacroix had worked on for several years; having commenced the project - which depicts an atrocity of 1822, when Ottoman forces slaughtered and enslaved thousands of Greeks – in early 1823, Delacroix 'acted with a great deal of discernment in postponing the execution of his idea' until he was confident that 'though the official French position was still not decided, there was reason to hope that the country would side with the Greeks'¹.

The present lot makes an interesting comparison with A Greek and a Turk in an Interior, painted later in the 1820s (private collection, exhibited at the Delacroix exhibition, New York, 2018, cat. no. 35).

¹ Sébastien Allard & Côme Fabre, Delacroix, New York, 2018, pp. 15-17.

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- 19th Century & Orientalist Paintings