Children's Concert

By 1900 this composition had already done a lot of travelling. It went to the Glaspalast in Munich in 1894, hung in Athens in 1896 while the first modern Olympic Games were on, and reached Vienna in 1897. For the Paris International Exhibition of 1900 Iakovidis painted the scene again. The National Gallery describes the earlier one as cooler and greyer, and says the bright version is the one now in the gallery. It took a prize in Paris, and the Gallery acquired it in 1911.

The brightness is what the second attempt was for. Light arrives from two windows on opposite sides, the scrubbed floorboards throw orange up into the room, and small notes of blue sit against that orange to make it burn harder. Four children are playing a drum, a trumpet, a harmonica, and a watering can, into whose spout the barefoot boy on the right is blowing. Their entire audience is one toddler in a red dress, held by a woman at the left, leaning out toward the noise.