Dance in Corfu

By 1842, the year this small canvas carries, Dionysios Vegias had been home on Corfu for three years. He came from Kefalonia, worked first under the sculptor Pavlos Prosalentis, then held an Ionian scholarship to the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome, and returned in 1839 to teach drawing at the school Prosalentis had founded in Corfu town, which he later directed. Rome prepared its students for history, religion and portraiture. What he painted here is 29 by 39 centimetres of islanders dancing, the kind of everyday subject that Greek painters would take up in quantity only a generation later. The National Gallery in Athens has it through the Koutlidis Foundation collection, and it is the only painting by Vegias the museum owns.