Greek Cavalry Men Resting in Forest (1858): Art, History and Details

Greek Cavalry Men Resting in Forest (1858) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798–1863).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

A leading figure of the French Romantic movement, Delacroix painted traditional historical subjects, but in a dramatic, expressive manner. The Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s caught the imagination of numerous French artists, who identified the Greek cause with their own revolution thirty years earlier. Like British Romantic poets, French artists regarded the Greek war of independence as a struggle for the survival of Western democracy and Christian civilization.

Object facts

• Title: Greek Cavalry Men Resting in Forest
• Date: 1858
• Creator attribution: Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798–1863)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 76 x 87.5 x 7.5 cm (29 15/16 x 34 7/16 x 2 15/16 in.); Unframed: 50.4 x 61.5 cm (19 13/16 x 24 3/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1916.1032

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade

Further reading listed by the museum

• "The Wade Collection." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 4, no. 1 (1917): 3-12.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1925.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1928.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.