Medea about to Kill her Children

As to the Medea in this painting, no heroine could better express the destructive power of women, a theme dear to the Romantics as it was to their successors, the Symbolists. Repudiated by Jason, Medea takes her revenge by killing the two children she has born to him; the subject is taken from Euripides’ tragedy, Medea.

This pcture is a reduced version, made in 1862, of Delacroix’s large painting (260 x 165 cm) exhibited at the Salon of 1838, now in the Mus�e du Lille.