Vasileios Hatzis

In the winter of 1912 the Greek government sent a painter to sea with its warships. Vasileios Hatzis spent the Balkan Wars aboard the fleet and painted what he watched from its decks: the action off Elli at the mouth of the Dardanelles that December, the battle near Lemnos a month later, the armoured cruiser Georgios Averof taking on coal. He also painted the ship that carried the body of Greece's King George I home after the king was shot in Thessaloniki in March 1913. A small oil of the harbour of Kavala, about 25 by 45 centimetres, comes from the same run of months. Flagged boats full of people fill one side of it, a warship holds the other, and the town sits faint in the distance.

The assignment fitted him. Born in Kastoria in 1870, when the town was still Ottoman, he grew up in Patras among ships and shipping people. From 1886 to 1893 he studied at the School of Fine Arts in Athens under Nikiforos Lytras, the school's leading teacher, and Konstantinos Volanakis, the marine painter of the generation before his own, and he stayed with the sea afterwards, along with landscapes and scenes of farmers and fishermen.

Hatzis died in Athens in 1915, in his mid-forties, leaving a canvas on the last battle of Byzantium unfinished. The artists' association gathered more than 260 of his pictures for a memorial exhibition at the Zappeion hall in Athens, and about 50 of them are now in the National Gallery there.