Painting poetry: Byron’s Oriental and other tales

Lord Byron’s poem Mazeppa was briefly popular in paintings during the first half of the nineteenth century, but was by no means his only work to have been painted. When Byron was on his Grand Tour of Europe in 1810-11, he wrote what he described as “a Turkish Tale” of The Giaour, published in 1813.

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan (1826), oil on canvas, 59.6 x 73.4 cm, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Wikimedia Commons.

That inspired Eugène Delacroix to paint The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan in 1826. The name Giaour is based on an offensive Turkish word for infidel, and Byron’s poem describes the revenge killing of Hassan by the Giaour for killing the latter’s lover. After their deadly combat, the Giaour is filled with remorse and retreats into a monastery. This painting was rejected by the Salon of 1827, but Delacroix went on to paint later versions.

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), Combat of the Giaour and Hassan (1835), oil on canvas, 73 x 61 cm, Petit Palais, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Nearly a decade later, in 1835, Delacroix returned to Byron’s poem, and painted this version of the Combat of the Giaour and Hassan. This time he had the benefit of watching Moroccan cavalry manoeuvres, and a commission from the Comte de Mornay. The resulting composition is radically different from his earlier version, and although Mornay seems to have been pleased with the result, the critics remained unimpressed.

In May 1810, Lord Byron, then only twenty-two, swam across the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles) between Abydos and Sestos, in a recreation of the myth of Hero and Leander. Three years later, the poet used the same Abydos as the setting of his heroic poem of The Bride of Abydos (1813). This was the literary basis for four of Eugène Delacroix’s paintings.

The young and beautiful Zuleika had been promised by her old father Giaffir to an old man, but fell in love with her supposed half-brother Selim. The couple elope to a cavern by the sea, where he reveals that he’s the leader of a group of pirates who are waiting to hear his pistol shot as a signal to them. When Giaffir and his men approach, Selim fires his pistol, but is killed by Giaffir, and Zuleika dies of sorrow.

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), The Bride of Abydos (1843-49), oil on canvas, 35.5 x 27.5 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Delacroix’s Bride of Abydos from 1843-49 shows the moment of climax as Selim is preparing himself to defend against Giaffir’s attack.

Although Delacroix was probably the painter most frequently influenced by Byron’s poetic stories, he was by no means the only one. In 1816-17, Byron wrote what many consider to be an autobiographical poem, Manfred, that inspired Robert Schumann and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in musical compositions.

This followed Byron’s ostracisation over alleged incest with his half-sister. Its hero Manfred is tortured by guilt in relation to the death of his beloved Astarte. Living in the Bernese Alps, where Byron was staying at the time, Manfred casts spells to summon seven spirits to help him forget and sublimate his guilt. As the spirits cannot control past events, he doesn’t achieve his aim, and cannot even escape by suicide. In the end, he dies.

John Martin (1789–1854), Manfred and the Alpine Witch (1837), watercolour, 38.8 x 55.8 cm, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, England. Wikimedia Commons.

John Martin’s watercolour of Manfred and the Alpine Witch (1837) shows Manfred conjuring a witch from a flooded cave in the mountains. Unusually light and sublime but not apocalyptic, it is perhaps one of Martin’s most beautiful works, and reminiscent of Turner’s alpine paintings.

In 1821, when Byron was living in Ravenna, Italy, with his lover Teresa, Countess Guiccioli, he composed a historical tragedy as a play in blank verse, Sardanapalus. This relies on an account in the historical library of Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian, and Mitford’s History of Greece, telling of the last of the great Assyrian monarchs, who ruled a large empire from his palaces in Nineveh. However, a rebellion grew against him, and the story reaches its climax in the fifth and final act of Byron’s play.

At the time, the river Euphrates was in high flood, which had torn down part of the protective walls of the city of Nineveh. Once the river started to fall again, this left no defences against the rebels. Their leader offered to spare Sardanapalus his life if he would surrender, but he refused, asking for a cease-fire of just an hour. During that period he had a funeral pyre built under his throne. He released his last faithful officer to flee for his life, and climbed the pyre. As he did so, his favourite wife Myrrha threw a lighted torch into the pyre, and climbed up after him, where they both burned to death.

Delacroix painted two versions of this famous work: the huge original in 1827, now hanging in the Louvre, and a smaller more painterly replica in 1844, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), oil on canvas, 392 × 496 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Delacroix departs considerably from Byron’s narrative to invite us to see Sardanapalus in a different light. In this, the original version, his brushwork is tight and the huge canvas intricately detailed.

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), The Death of Sardanapalus (small copy) (1844), oil on canvas, 73.71 × 82.47 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. Wikimedia Commons.

When he painted this smaller replica seventeen years later, it wasn’t intended to please the Salon, and he was far more painterly in its facture; Instead of showing Sardanapalus and Myrrha mounting the funeral pyre, Delacroix places the king on a huge divan, surrounded by the utter chaos and panic as his guards massacre wives and courtesans.

The last and greatest of Lord Byron’s works to be painted by the masters is Don Juan, an epic poem that he started writing in 1819 and left incomplete on his death in 1824. Based on traditional Spanish folk stories of the life of an incorrigible womaniser, Byron portrays his hero as a victim easily seduced by women. Despite its seventeen cantos, the attention of painters has concentrated on events in the second canto, after Don Juan’s first love affair with a married woman. As a consequence of that, Don Juan’s mother sends her errant son to travel in Europe, and that results in shipwreck, from which he is the sole survivor.

For Eugène Delacroix, the shipwreck became an obsession, linking back to the masterwork of his mentor Théodore Géricault, The Wreck of the Medusa (1818–19).

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), Shipwreck of Don Juan (1840), oil on canvas, 135 x 196 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

In Delacroix’s Shipwreck of Don Juan from 1840, Don Juan and his companions have run out of food, so draw lots to determine who will be sacrificed to feed the other survivors.

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), Castaways in a Ship’s Boat (c 1840-47), oil on canvas, 36 x 57 cm, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts Государственный музей изобразительных искусств имени А. С. Пушкина, Moscow, Russia. Wikimedia Commons.

At some time prior to the Salon of 1847, Delacroix revisited the shipwreck in his Castaways in a Ship’s Boat (c 1840-47). The boat has shrunk in size and the number of survivors is falling steadily.

Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893), The Finding of Don Juan by Haidée (1869-70), watercolour and gouache over pencil, 47.5 x 57.6 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Wikimedia Commons.

Ford Madox Brown’s watercolour of The Finding of Don Juan by Haidée from 1869-70 shows Haidée, a Greek pirate’s daughter, and her maid Zoe discovering the apparently lifeless body of the hero on a beach. Inevitably, Don Juan falls in love with Haidée, despite them having no common language. Her father takes a dislike to Don Juan, and has him put into slavery.