02 Paintings by the Orientalist Artists in the Nineteenth-Century, with footnotes, 48

Eugène Delacroix  (1798–1863)

Combat of the Giaour and Hassan, c. 1835

Oil on canvas, 

29 1/8 by 23 5/8 inches

Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris

"Giaour" is the Turkish word for infidel or non-believer, and is similar to the Arabic word "kafir". The story is Byron's only fragmentary narrative poem. The main story is of Leila, a member of her master Hassan's harem, who loves the giaour and is killed by being drowned in the sea by Hassan. In revenge, the giaour kills him and then enters a monastery due to his remorse.

Byron was inspired to write the poem during his Grand Tour between 1810 and 1811. While in Athens, he became aware of the Turkish custom of throwing a woman found guilty of adultery into the sea wrapped in a sack. More on The Giaour

Eugène Delacroix  (1798–1863)

he Combat of the Giaour and Hassan, c. 1826

Oil on canvas

Height: 59.6 cm (23.4 ″); Width: 73.4 cm (28.8 ″)

Art Institute of Chicago

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.

As a painter and muralist, Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish author Walter Scott and the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic. Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Lord Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the "forces of the sublime", of nature in often violent action.

However, Delacroix was given to neither sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire, "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible." MoreFerdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix

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