Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha

The Oriental subjects of early-nineteenth-century authors provided a source of inspiration for Romantic painters. Lord Byron's Giaour was a favorite of both Gericault and Delacroix. Byron claimed that the tale of a tragic love triangle, involving the Giaour (infidel), the Pasha Hassan, and the Pasha's beautiful concubine, was based on the story of a young Venetian overheard in a Levantine coffee house. Soon after the publication of the French translation in 1823, Delacroix read the poem and noted in his journal the "exchange of two stares, that of the dying man and that of the murderer." This vigorously rendered lithograph captures the confrontation between the Pasha, whose angry stare glazes over as he succumbs, and the Christian, who confronts his own deed with horror.