Art History
Volume 22, Issue 5 (December 1999)
Pages 676-704
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.00182
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Professor of Art History
The University of California, Berkeley
While painting Massacres of Chios in 1824, Eugène Delacroix wrote in his journal that ‘The mulatto will do very well.’ This paper asks why a ‘mixed-blood’ would figure in a picture painted on behalf of the Greek War of Independence and argues that Chios must be understood as material evidence of the history of France’s imperial aspirations, as a vestige of its confusions as well as its experiments. To broaden the geopolitical horizon of interpretation of Chios is to appreciate the extent to which global politics were performed and remembered in the studio space of an ambitious, insecure and sexually preoccupied young French male painter.
Read or purchase the article here.