Which French Romantic painter created 'The Massacre at Chios'?

Eugène Delacroix created The Massacre at Chios. Completed in 1824, the monumental Romantic painting depicts Greek civilians suffering during the Ottoman destruction of Chios in the Greek War of Independence.

Delacroix presented the work at the Paris Salon of 1824, where its scale, emotional intensity, and loose, expressive handling challenged academic expectations. Rather than focusing on a victorious hero, he showed exhausted families, wounded figures, and a landscape marked by devastation. That emphasis on suffering helped make the painting a powerful example of Romanticism’s interest in contemporary violence and emotion.

The painting was controversial when first exhibited. Some critics objected to its color and composition; Antoine-Jean Gros reportedly dismissed it with the famous phrase “a massacre of painting.” Despite the criticism, the French state purchased it in 1824. It is now in the Louvre. The work is sometimes confused with Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, another major French Romantic painting that influenced Delacroix’s composition and dramatic treatment of human suffering.