The art of history: Delacroix’s greatest paintings

Knowledge of the historical background illuminates Eugène Delacroix’s four vast and complex paintings: The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople (1840), The Massacre at Chios (1824) and Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage (1845).  All these paintings portray actual events and take place in remote regions: pagan Assyria in 612 BC, medieval Byzantium (now Turkey) in 1204, modern Greece in 1822 and Morocco in 1832.  Sardanapalus and Massacre depict violent death and destruction; Entry and Sultan contain equestrian portraits of powerful monarchs.  With vibrant and luminous colors, all the paintings display exotic spectacles and epic grandeur.

Mort de Sardanapale – Eugène Delacroix – Musée du Louvre Peintures RF 2346 – après restauration octobre 2023

Sardanapalus shows the apocalyptic end of the King of Assyria, whose dissolute life has provoked a rebellion.  Faced with imminent defeat as the insurgent armies invade the royal palace at Nineveh (modern Mosul in Iraq), the King orders the destruction of all his wives, concubines, slaves and treasure — everything that gave him pleasure in life.  As the funeral pyre is prepared, Delacroix shows the frenzied execution of the decree.  All the women and slaves know they are going to be killed, but no one dares to disobey the despot.  The Egyptian pharaohs had buried their possessions with them for use in the next world; Sardanapalus destroyed his possessions so that no one else could enjoy them.

In the exhibition catalogue of 1828 Delacroix described the action in Sardanapalus: “The rebels besiege him in his palace.  Reclining on a superb bed at the summit of an immense pyre, Sardanapalus gives the order to his eunuchs and the palace officers to slaughter his women, his pages—even his horses and his favorite dogs, so that nothing that had served his pleasure might survive him.  [One woman in the upper center], not wishing to be put to death by a slave, hanged herself from one of the columns supporting the vaulted ceiling.  Sardanapalus’ cupbearer, Baleah, finally committed the pyre to flame and threw himself upon it.”  In Byron’s play Sardanapalus (1821), the king  has sent his queen and courtiers safely out of the palace, and dies with his favorite concubine, who chooses to remain with him to the end.  Delacroix had read Byron’s play, but interpreted the story differently.  His friends posed for the painting, his female models were sexually compliant, and he borrowed many Turkish artifacts to provide the oriental decor.

The massive figure of Sardanapalus has a heavy dark beard, wears a jeweled turban and flowing white robe, leans on his right arm, and raises his left knee to form a tent-like apex.  His feet slide out of the robe and appear on the vast rose-colored divan, decorated at one end with a huge elephant’s head, tusks and trunk.

Barthélémy Jobert (with my paraphrase and additions) provides an excellent description of the content and structure.  The subject is arranged on a great diagonal that divides it in two, running from Sardanapalus at top left—calm, stretched on his bed and contemplating the scene—and terminating with his cupbearer Baleah, at the right with his arms frantically waving, announcing the victory of the rebels to his master and at the same time signaling the execution of his orders.  The fire is spreading, and smoke already curls at the top right of the picture.  Behind, one sees the massive white façade of the palace.  His concubine Aisheh hangs herself, a dark slave prepares to kill her pale companion.  On the other side of the bed, women bring a golden pitcher containing the poison.

Other victims kill themselves or have their throats cut as they die or beg for mercy.  One muscular man plunges his knife into the throat of a comely naked woman he grasps from behind and bends backwards.  Three nude dying women form a triangle at the sides and end of the vast divan.  Jobert continues: “To the left, a black servant kills a horse, which he restrains by its bridle.  The picture consists of different juxtaposed groups: Sardanapalus and the woman stretched out on the [edge of] the bed, her arms extended to the side; Aisheh, the other concubine, and the servant, Baleah, with his arm tensed, his companion in a reverse movement, hands on head, self-absorbed; the standing woman, nude, whose throat is being cut by a guard; the black man with the horse; the woman who prepares to stab herself with a dagger while her neighbour is in convulsions; and finally the two who appear from behind, bringing poison and weapons.”  In the virtuoso display of naked flesh, exotic decor and manic  movement, the king seems to enjoy contemplating the destruction of everything he once valued while he calmly prepares for his own death.

During the Fourth Crusade, as the Christians struggled against the Saracens, the western warriors, led by Baldwin, Count of Flanders and future emperor, captured Constantinople in 1204.  Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades reveals that in Delacroix’s Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople (whose title influenced James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels, 1889), the conquerors abandoned their Christian charity and savagely ignored the civilians’ pleas for mercy: “The sack of Constantinople is unparalleled in history.  The French and Flemings were filled with a lust for destruction.  They rushed in a howling mob down the streets and through the houses, snatching up everything that glittered and destroying whatever they could not carry, pausing only to murder or to rape, or to break open the wine-cellars for their refreshment.  Wounded women and children lay dying in the streets.  For three days the ghastly scenes of pillage and bloodshed continued, till the huge and beautiful city was a shambles.”

By Eugène Delacroix – Entry of the Crusaders in Constantinople

In 1855 Charles Baudelaire praised the subject, colour, mood and landscape of Delacroix’s picture: “the painting of the Crusaders is so profoundly penetrating, subject matter aside, by virtue of its stormy and mournful harmony!  What a sky and what a sea!  Everything is tumultuous and calm, as in the wake of a great event.  The city, spreading out behind the Crusaders who have just crossed it, extends out with marvelous truthfulness.”

Six of Count Baldwin’s helmeted generals ride behind him and raise their long spears with victorious flags.  Jobert writes: “Two groups of Byzantines, one on the right and one on the left, beg for mercy: on one side, two women, one of them bent over, stripped half-naked and prostrate, holding up her dead or fainted companion; [behind her a young man lies dying, and a woman is attacked by a Crusader]; on the other, an old man, who tries to protect his daughter and toward whom a helpless young boy is turned. The principal figures emphasize the main action—the Crusaders’ victory and the Byzantines’ distress.  In the background, as Constantinople is pillaged, the Golden Horn and the Bosporus are spread out beneath a cloudy sky made darker” by the burst of fires and plumes of smoke that signal the sack and plunder of the great city.  As in Sardanapalus, the treasures of the fabulously rich capital spill onto the foreground, and are trampled on by Baldwin’s restless stallion.  Delacroix’s themes are the sheer destruction of war, the violent deaths of men and women, the despair of the old and rape of the young.

The Greeks revolted against the Turks in 1821 and declared independence the following year.  In The Ottoman Centuries, Lord Kinross writes of Chios, the north Aegean island only 3 miles from the Turkish coast: “When Sultan Mahmud’s armies had recovered from the first shock of surprise, he suppressed the revolt and retaliated savagely against the Greeks for the massacre of the Turks throughout the Morea [the southern mainland].  In Chios, after a fireship of the rebel Greek fleet had destroyed the Turkish flagship with admiral and crew, the Turks took their revenge with the destruction of the whole prosperous island.”

The Massacre at Chios (1824) by Eugène Delacroix

The Turks were notorious for their atrocities.  After  recovering from their recent defeat by the Greeks, who had captured Patras on the west coast and destroyed the Moslem quarter, they took revenge on the rich and peaceful Chios.  In April 1822 ten thousand troops invaded the island, and during a month of massacre and looting, 20,000 victims were butchered; most women and children were deported to Turkey and sold into slavery.  Of the original population of 100,000, only 900 Greeks survived on Chios.  As word of the atrocity spread, the Europeans were outraged and Delacroix’s painting fueled the fires.

Jobert also describes The Massacre of Chios: “The figures are grouped two by two except for the old woman [at the centre] who seems, without real hope, to implore the heavens.  A broken blade on the ground [next to a bag of scattered pearls] symbolizes the futility of all resistance.  To the left, next to a seated soldier—wounded  and rigid with pain, to whom a dazed or dying adolescent clings—two young people embrace.  An insurgent, fatally wounded, is wept over by a woman who leans on his shoulder.  To the right, there is the old woman, the dead woman and her child [still seeking her breast].”

A turbaned Turk on a rearing white stallion carries off a woman, cruelly attached to his rearing horse; her clothes fall off her and her flesh is torn as she’s dragged along.  “The Turk is unsheathing his sword to get rid of a young man who [bravely but hopelessly] tries to stop him.  This man is the link to the second plane, where Delacroix shows the guards, seated [quietly] in the shade, with their guns in hand.  In the center one can see Turks killing the inhabitants with guns and sabres, and corpses stretched out on the ground.  In the background, clearly lighted, is a huge landscape: the island, the devastated countryside, the burned houses, the port, and in the distance, the [greenish] black sea.. . . . In the two great pyramidal masses on the right and left, one group of figures piles up around the wounded Greek, the other swirls around the Turkish soldier, which reinforces the opposition between the conquered and the conquerors, between the exhaustion of one and the cold violence of the other.”

Delacroix, speaking of himself, observes of the Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage, at Meknes in north-central Morocco: “The picture reproduces exactly the ceremony of an audience which the author witnessed in March 1832, when he accompanied King Louis Philippe’s special diplomatic mission to Morocco.”  After the French had conquered Algeria in 1830, an ambassador was sent to appease the powerful Sultan.

Eugène Delacroix: Muley-Abd-Err-Rahmann, sultan du Maroc sortant de son palais de Mequinez

Delacroix adds: “To the right of the Sultan are two of his ministers. . . . The Sultan, distinctly mulatto [despite his dark complexion], wears a bracelet of mother-of-pearl beads wrapped around his arm.  He is mounted upon a Barbary horse of great size.  To his left is a page whose duty is to chase away the insects by waving a bit of cloth from time to time.  Only the Sultan is on horseback.”

The Sultan wears a hooded yellow cape and gown over a white turban and shirt. His kingly presence is enhanced by silver stirrups, yellow slippers, pink-and-gold harness and saddle, grey horse with cropped mane, green-and-red parasol with a wooden handle and topped with a small golden bowl.  His grey-white horse nods its head as if bowing before the rider.  About twenty white-tunicked guards on his left raise their sharp spears toward the bright blue sky.  The oval entrance and massive medieval square citadel that guards the city appear in the background.

Both Baudelaire and Delacroix fiercely opposed the prevailing 19th-century idea of progress.  Baudelaire wrote brilliantly about Delacroix in 1863: “In his work there is nothing but desolation, massacres, conflagrations; everything bears witness to the eternal, incorrigible barbarousness of mankind.  Cities in flames and smouldering victims with their throats cut, women raped, even children thrown under the hooves of horses or under the daggers of crazed mothers.  This entire oeuvre is like some terrifying hymn in honour of fatality and irremediable suffering.”

Delacroix had lived through the convulsions of the Napoleonic era, and created shocking narrative pictures about conflicts with the Muslim world that expressed his political ideas.  He had stated his negative views, taken up by Baudelaire, in his Journal (April 1849): “All progress must necessarily bring not an even greater progress, but in the end the negation of progress, a return to the point where we started. . . . The progressive evolution of things, toward both the good and the bad, has brought society in our own time to the edge of the abyss into which it could very well fall and give way to complete barbarism.”  The acute observations of painter and poet apply with equal force to our own time.  After thousands of years of civilization, we are still torn apart by insane wars in Ukraine and Israel, in the Congo and the Sudan; and America offers the world, as an example of democracy, a criminal candidate for president.

Jeffrey Meyers has published five books on art: Painting and the Novel, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis, Impressionist Quartet, Modigliani: A Life and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real.

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