Girl in the Vegetable Garden

The National Gallery dates this canvas no more closely than 1915 to 1920, and adds a question mark to it. Those are the war years, and Zairis spent them in Germany, where he had been living since 1894. In German towns a vegetable plot had stopped being a pleasant corner of the garden by then. The British naval blockade cut imports, the potato crop failed, and the winter of 1916 to 1917 is still remembered there as the turnip winter, when households ate the root normally given to cattle. Working people and their labour were Zairis's standing subject. The Greek title the museum uses names a kitchen garden, the plot behind a house rather than a farmer's field, and that is where the girl is standing.