Church Interior

The National Gallery gives this one no date at all, and that is the honest answer, because Ralli painted Greek Orthodox interiors for decades and they resist being sorted by year. The same furnishings run through all of them. The icon screen, the lectern that holds the chanter's book, the oil lamps on their chains, the standing candles. He collected the material on trips through Greece and Asia Minor and finished the pictures in France, where religious scenes of the Orthodox world were one of his steadiest lines of work and his church interiors were what buyers in Paris and London knew him for. This is a small one, 35 by 22 centimetres, a tall narrow format. It hangs in the gallery's main building in Athens.