Incense
Details
The story
The gallery dates this canvas to about 1907, two years before the painter died and some 30 years into a working life spent largely on Orthodox church interiors and Greek village subjects.
What happens in it is a very small act. Frankincense comes as hard pale grains, and the Greek title names the resin rather than the smoke. A woman is feeding those grains onto burning charcoal in a censer in front of the icons.
Her dress can be placed. The women in Ralli's Greek pictures wear the traditional costume of Megara, the farming town on the coast west of Athens, which he painted again and again from about 1890 onward, working through its variations while it was still ordinary clothing there.
