Foster Mother

The Greek title is Psychomana, and it does not translate tidily. It names a woman who takes in a child not her own and raises it as hers, a soul-mother, an arrangement that was common and entirely unofficial in the villages of the 19th century.

Gyzis put the whole thing in one plain room. The young woman sits nursing an orphaned baby under an icon of the Virgin hung on the wall. Her own child has climbed onto a little chair and is stretching up to reach her. Over by the door, apart from all of it, the baby's older sister sits in mourning black, holding his cap.

Happiness and grief share the room. The light falls on the white cloth wrapped round the infant and on the mother's red jacket, and the girl in the doorway keeps her own corner of the picture. Gyzis worked on the canvas across 1882 and 1883, and it came to the gallery in the Koutlidis Foundation collection, which is the group it hangs with today.