Workshop of Athens 894

The number in this name belongs to a pot. Athens 894 is the inventory number of a Late Geometric amphora in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and in 1968 the British archaeologist Nicolas Coldstream gathered around it a large body of vases painted in the same manner. He called the group a workshop, because the pots show several hands working side by side, and the most distinctive of them became known as the Painter of Athens 894.

So when a museum label says workshop of Athens 894, it is making a careful claim. The vase comes out of this circle of Athenian painters, and nobody is saying which of them held the brush.

They worked in Athens in the last decades of the 8th century BC. They kept the old Geometric scheme of bands, meanders and zigzags that the Dipylon Master, the leading Athenian vase painter of the generation before, had brought to its height, but they drew more loosely and filled their friezes with figures. Their favourite subjects were mourners around a bier and long processions of chariots, with now and then a centaur or another creature borrowed from the Near East. Several of their vases also carry snakes modelled in clay and laid along the rim, the handles or the shoulder.