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‘Whose colour was no black nor white nor grey, But an extraneous mixture, which no pen Can trace, although perhaps the pencil may’: Aspasie and Delacroix’s Massacres of Chios
Author(s) -
Grimaldo Grigsby Darcy
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8365.00182
Subject(s) - painting , studio , art , interpretation (philosophy) , visual arts , art history , trace (psycholinguistics) , geopolitics , white (mutation) , independence (probability theory) , pencil (optics) , history , horizon , politics , engineering , philosophy , law , political science , mechanical engineering , linguistics , biochemistry , chemistry , statistics , mathematics , physics , astronomy , gene
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.