Kammeni, Santorini

Kammeni means burnt. The island in the middle of the picture is new ground, raised piece by piece by eruptions inside the flooded crater of Santorini, and its tallest dome had been pushed up only about 50 years before Maleas came, in the outbreak that ran from 1866 to 1870. He painted this in 1924 from a terrace on the rim, a whitewashed parapet and a few plants rooted in the stones close under him, the water below passing from pale green over the shallows into deep blue further out. The following summer the ground moved again. A vent opened on Kameni on 11 August 1925 and stayed active until 1928, and the lava it poured out welded the separate islets he had painted into the single body that visitors walk across today.