The Souliot Women
Ary Scheffer (1795-1858) · 1827
A group of women and children crowd the edge of a cliff above a gulf of empty air. Their men have been defeated by the troops of Ali Pasha of Ioannina, and rather than fall into his hands they have resolved to throw themselves from the rocks. One woman holds a baby to her breast, another raises her arms to the sky, an older woman at the centre seems to lead them forward, and at the edge a figure is already stepping into the void. The embroidered jackets and white skirts of Epirus are painted with care against the dark rock.
Scheffer, a painter of Dutch birth working in Paris, exhibited the canvas at the Salon of eighteen twenty seven, when the Greek war of independence had made philhellenism a passion of the French Romantics. The episode of the Souliot women is set in eighteen hundred and three, at the cliff of Zalongo. The state bought the picture from the artist on the twenty ninth of May eighteen twenty eight for four thousand francs and sent it to the Luxembourg museum, where it hung until eighteen seventy three before coming to the Louvre. It is signed at the lower right.
Did You Know? The women of Souli chose to dance off the cliff of Zalongo rather than be captured, and their story made them heroines of the Greek cause across Europe.
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