At the dock

A steamer lies alongside the quay with its funnel still smoking, and the crowd that came down to meet it fills the bottom of the picture: women in bustled dresses under parasols, men in straw hats, a vendor sitting beside her baskets, an awning pitched at the far left. The gallery dates the painting to the first half of the 1870s, when Greek roads were bad enough that coastal steamers carried most of the traffic between towns, and the arrival of one was the event of the day. Volanakis worked on an upright canvas here, so the masts and the cast-iron gas lamp on the quay stand in the same vertical. The picture came to the National Gallery from the collection of Stefanos Skouloudis, a banker born in Crete who went on to serve as prime minister of Greece and left his paintings to the museum.