Children in Courtyard

In 1910 Aravantinos was at home in Greece, in a gap between two kinds of work. He had finished the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin in 1907, and in 1908 he came back for military service, where the army set him to drawing its uniforms, historical ones included, in colour. He was also designing the stage for operettas by the Corfu-born composer Spyros Samaras. In October 1912 he was mobilised for the Balkan Wars and sent to the Epirus front, and after that the theatre took the rest of his working life.

From that short civilian stretch the gallery has a small oil on canvas, 26 by 28.5 centimetres, of children in a courtyard. Its catalogue record gives no date. The year 1910 comes from the label beside it, and the painting reached Athens as a private donation.