Lady in the Countryside

The title is worth hearing exactly. Most of the women in Ralli's Greek pictures are villagers in heavy traditional dress. This one is a lady, kyria in the Greek, a townswoman out in open country, in the clothes of 1893.

It is a very small thing, painted on wood, 16 by 21.5 centimetres and wider than it is tall. By the 1890s painters with solid exhibition careers thought nothing of working outdoors on boards this size, with the whole picture settled in a sitting or two.

Almost nothing else about it is recorded. The gallery gives the year, the wood, the measurements and an inventory number, and leaves the woman unnamed.