First Steps

Everything in this room is Bavarian: the leaded window with its geranium, the dark carved chairs, the crucifix high on the pale wall, the braid and bodice of the girl at the table. Iakovidis was working in Munich when he painted it, and he showed the canvas at the Glaspalast exhibition there in 1892. In Greece it went on to become one of the most reproduced pictures in the country, a family scene schoolchildren still recognise, and the household in it is a German village one.

The grandmother has not let go. Both her hands are still around the child's ribs, while the older sister leans in from the far side with her arm stretched flat across the table, palm open. Daylight from the window settles on the white dress and makes it the brightest thing in the room. The National Gallery treats this canvas as the point where his handling of light changed. At the right edge of the table lies a bundle of red wool with the knitting needles still stuck in it, the one loud colour in the picture.