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Dimensions: 82 by 104cm., 32¼ by 41in.

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Provenance: Yulia Samoyloff Pahlen

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Exhibited:

Milan, Brera, Esposizione di Belle Arti, 1839, no. 94

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Literature: Francesco Ambrosoli, 'Barca con greci fuggitivi dall'isola di Scio', Album. Esposizione di Belle Arti a Milano, Milan, 1839, pp. 65-8
I. Fumagalli, 'Esposizione di Belle Arti nella I. R. Accademia di Brera', Biblioteca Italiana, 1839, p. 277
C. Tenca, 'Esposizione di Belle Arti e Brera', La Fama, 1839, p. 222
Francesco Hayez, Le mie memorie, Milan, 1890, p. 278
Fernando Mazzocca, Francesco Hayez. Catalogo ragionato, Milan, 1994, p. 257, no. 235, discussed & Gandini engraving illustrated (as Barca con greci fuggitivi dall'isola di Scio)

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Notes: We are grateful to Fernando Mazzocca for his assistance in cataloguing this work.
Painted in 1839, Hayez' Flight from Chios transforms a specific event - the plight of Greek captives fleeing the terror of Chios accompanied by Turkish mariners - into a majestic rendering of the persistent perils that beset the Greek struggle for independence at the hands of Ottoman oppression. The culmination of a theme that Hayez had explored over the previous ten years, following its hugely successful reception at the Brera in Milan, Flight from Chios became widely celebrated through the 1839 engraving made after the present work by Domenico Gandini.

The particular subject was a consequence of the fighting that broke out between Greek and Turkish nationals on the island of Chios in the spring of 1822. Located just seven kilometres off the Turkish coast, tensions had long existed between the inhabitants of Chios and neighbouring Turkey. Successful farmers, merchants and seafarers, the Chians presided over a flourishing island economy. In addition their maritime prowess ensured the maintenance of vital trade links between the Black Sea, the Aegean and the Mediterranean. Many of the island's elite held prominent positions in Constantinople, the Ottoman capital. Yet with the rise of the Ottoman Empire Chios fell increasingly under Ottoman rule.

Incipient distrust between the indigenous Chians and ever increasing Turkish governance of the island erupted into violence in 1822 when several hundred Greeks from the neighbouring island of Samos landed on Chian shores and demolished mosques and attacked Turkish strongholds. Although some Chians joined the uprising many did not. However, the Ottoman response was brutal and indiscriminate. In the ensuing revenge killings 82,000 Chians were slaughtered and thousands of other Greeks were either forced into slavery or into exile.

The horrific plight of the Chians quickly became a cause célèbre throughout Europe, written up as a vivid example of the barbarism of the infidel. The subject in turn inspired painters, as recorded most famously in Eugène Delacroix's monumental oil painting Massacre at Chios that was exhibited to great acclaim at the Paris Salon of 1824.

Although keenly aware of Delacroix's composition, when Hayez addressed the subject he did not depict the carnage of the event; but dwelt instead on the complex rapport between the Chians and the Ottomans. In Hayez' oil both captors and captives make off from the island by boat. Although saved from the immediate terror of events on Chios, the women are still, quite clearly, subjugated to their Turkish overlords - a clear reference to Greece's indefatigable spirit in the face of long-standing Ottoman oppression.

The exotic frisson that the act of abduction conjured up in the minds of the bourgeois audiences of the time was a rich theme for Romantic writers and artists. It was also a theme that held consistent appeal in depictions of the Greek struggle for independence against their non-Christian oppressors. Thirty years after Hayez' Flight from Chios, important painters such as Nikiforos Lytras broached this theme, as seen in his celebrated painting The Abducted Maid. The drama of a chaste young girl being carried off in triumph as booty portrayed the ultimate treachery of the heathen.

To underline this Western message Hayez' composition is laden with Christian symbolism. Hayez inclusion of twelve figures in the boat is an allusion to Jesus' disciples, while the calm serenity exhibited by the helmsman and his fellow mariners in the face of a swelling sea recalls Jesus quelling the storm when out fishing on the Sea of Galilee.

In structuring the composition however, Hayez found inspiration in a more recent travesty of justice - namely the sinking of the French naval frigate 'Méduse' in 1816 and its depiction by Théodore Géricault in his painting of The Raft of the Medusa. Just as the survivors clinging to the Medusa's raft were immortalised in Gericault's monumental canvas, so in the controlled drama of the present work Hayez elevates a specific and recent event - the horror that had befallen a whole island - into a single epic image.

Significant in the history of the present work is its early provenance. The painting was commissioned from Hayez by Countess Yulia Samoyloff Pahlen (1803-1875), popularly known as the 'Russian Lady of Milan'.

Collector and connoisseur, the Countess was renowned for her generous patronage of the Arts, her regular and lively salons at which she held court and her amorous liaisons of which she made no secret.

Muse and model to artists, musicians and writers of the period, the Goncourt brothers recorded both the Countess's generosity and her wild antics, describing her as '... the important figure of Milan through her expenses and charitable causes, which surpass her income... and her broad-daylight lovers, going from artist to artist and sculptor to singer, promenading around Milan with her lovers in a coach and four.'

An intimate friend of the composer Giovanni Pacini, The Countess was a confidante of Franz Liszt who dedicated the Ricordi edition of his Soirées musicales to her, and the inspiration of Russian Karl Briullov who immortalised her in his monumental painting The Last Days of Pompeii. Flight from Chios was the second of two works by Hayez that the Countess owned. The other of 1830 was a portrait of the famed Italian tenor Giovanni David in his role of Agobar in Pacini's opera Gli arabi nelle Gallie. Also in her collection were paintings by Federico Moja, Carlo Ferrari and Franz Xaver Winterhalter.