Delacroix's decision in 1824 was to paint the aftermath, not the action. The Ottoman massacre of the Greek population of Chios had occurred two years earlier, in April 1822, during the Greek War of Independence. Ottoman forces under Nasuhzade Ali Pasha landed on the island and over several weeks killed roughly twenty-five thousand of its inhabitants, enslaved forty-five thousand, and deported or displaced most of the remainder. The international press carried it as the defining atrocity of the war. The political pressure on European governments to intervene on the Greek side intensified across the next several years and eventually contributed to the Anglo-French-Russian naval intervention at Navarino in 1827.

The conventional history-painting choice would have been the violence itself: the Ottoman cavalry charging, the islanders fighting back, a heroic Greek death or a recognisable atrocity in mid-act. Delacroix refused all of it. The painting is composed instead around exhaustion. A tableau of Greek survivors in the foreground sits, lies, or stands in resignation. A child grasps the breast of a dead mother. An old man stares without focus. A single mounted Ottoman cavalryman drags a naked woman behind his horse on the right edge, and the smoke of a burning village rises behind them. The figures are not heroic. They are not even resisting. Painting them this way at the Paris Salon of 1824 was a deliberate political-aesthetic act: Delacroix is refusing to redeem the subject with any gesture of resistance the audience could absorb as a moral consolation.

The Salon jury was divided. Stendhal called the painting a "massacre of painting," disapproving. Antoine-Jean Gros called it the painting of the year. The painting was bought by the French state, partly as a diplomatic gesture toward Greek independence, and hangs now at the Louvre. Delacroix's career was made by it. His Liberty Leading the People (1830, see the platform entry for that work) would soften the choice; the figure of Liberty is the kind of heroic redemption that Scenes from the Massacres at Chios had refused. The earlier painting is the harder one. Delacroix knew this. He never apologised for it.

The choice to paint the moment AFTER violence (when nothing can be undone, when no rescue is coming) became one of the founding gestures of Romantic painting. Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, painted five years earlier (also on the platform), had argued for the same gesture; Delacroix made it explicit. The two paintings sit ten rooms apart at the Louvre. Read together, they form the strongest argument the early Romantic generation made for painting as a form of political testimony that does not pretend to political effect.