Church in Blooming Field in Bavaria

The National Gallery dates this to somewhere in the 1880s, when Iakovidis was living in Munich and going out into the Bavarian countryside in summer to paint what was in front of him. The canvas is 19 by 32 centimetres, roughly the size of a sheet of writing paper, and nothing about it was meant for an exhibition wall.

The church of the title gets a sliver of the right edge, a thin grey spire behind trees, with a farm building and its red roof closer in. Almost everything else is weeds. Coarse leaves across the front, white daisies scattered through the middle, a few orange and red flowers along a dark strip of ploughed earth, one leaning post. The sky is grey and laid on in short thick strokes, and the paint runs thin enough in places for the weave of the canvas to show through. He signed it in red in the bottom right corner, down in the grass.