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Your galleryThe Combat of the Giaour and Hassan
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Trace the opposing riders and horses as a single knot of movement, then find the sharp accents of red, blue, and white.
Delacroix drew this confrontation from Lord Byron’s poem The Giaour, in which a warrior avenges his lover’s death. He painted it in 1826, before his journey to North Africa. The scene belongs to a European literary imagination of violence and distant places, rather than recording a battle he witnessed.
Oil on canvas · 59.6 × 73.4 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Romanticism
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Details and source
- Museum title
- The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan
- Artist
- Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798–1863)
- Date
- 1826
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 59.6 × 73.4 cm (23 1/2 × 28 7/8 in.); Framed: 87.4 × 101.3 cm (34 3/8 × 39 7/8 in.)
- Credit line
- Gift of Bertha Palmer Thorne, Rose Movius Palmer, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur M. Wood, and Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Palmer
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.