Lot 16: Nikiforos Lytras , Greek 1832-1904 Young girl by the river oil on canvas laid down on panel

signed lower left oil on canvas laid down on panel

31.5 by 18cm., 12½ by 7¼in.

Olga Metzafou-Polyzou, Jakobides Retrospective, Athens, 2005, p. 21, no. 2, illustrated

Sale: Christie's, London, 16 December 1997, lot 35
Private Collection, Athens

In the present work, a young girl gazes directly at the viewer, interrupted from her washing on the shores of an Athenian river. Other girls climb up a steep incline in the background, as she leans carefully towards the viewer, holding back her colourful petticoats as laundry from her basket tumbles into the still water. The atmosphere of tranquil contemplation juxtaposed with everyday industry makes this work a quintessential example of Lytras' picturesque genre scenes.

Dr. Nelly Missirlis' notes on Lytras' work The Easter Egg (sold in these rooms on 12 May 2005, lot 9) apply equally to the present work: '... Lytras continues the series of genre subjects, characterized by a single figure carrying out some form of work, which he began with In the kitchen, and which were initially inspired by the Düsseldorf School painter Ludwig Knaus. It was a genre Lytras furthermore explored in many of his subsequent works, such as The Kiss, The Wait, I Don't Like School, The Orphan, The Milkman.'

Lytras is considered, together with Nicholaos Gysis and Georgios Jakobides, a seminal figure of the Munich school. Various factors - not least the socio-political connection of Greece and Bavaria - led to an exodus of young artists to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich during the late nineteenth century. There they built on the foundations of German academicism and Greek classicism, establishing a new iconography of modern Greece. Using the strength of representation gleaned from this German academicism, Lytras created images that celebrated folkloric and traditional elements in illustrating the vitality of rural Greek life.

The present work will be included in the Nikiforos Lytras monograph being prepared by Dr Nelly Missirli.