After the Destruction of Psara

Psara was a small island in the eastern Aegean that had put a large fleet into the Greek war of independence. On 21 June 1824 an Ottoman force landed there, and the islanders and the refugees sheltering with them were killed, enslaved or driven onto whatever boats were still afloat. Gyzis came back to that subject more than 70 years later. He began working on it in 1896 and was still at it through the short war of 1897, which Greece lost badly.

He gave the escape the shape of a shipwreck, so the sea finishes what the soldiers started. The boat sits low and crowded, a figure in Greek dress has risen to his feet in it, and the people have brought icons and a flag out with them. Writers on the picture usually set it beside Géricault's Raft of the Medusa of 1819, the painting that taught Europe how to imagine survivors adrift.

This canvas runs to 188 centimetres across and is mostly night, with red used in small amounts. The gallery also holds a much smaller treatment of the same scene, 41 by 59 centimetres, one of several runs Gyzis made at the idea.