Landscape

Greek painting in 1901 still belonged to the Munich-trained generation, who built their figure subjects up in studio brown. Phokas had learned his trade in the private academies of Paris instead, and he painted landscape almost to the exclusion of everything else, Attica and the Romanian countryside he had grown up in. Greek writing on him counts him among the people who brought open-air work and impressionist colour into the country.

The picture is small, 27 by 34.8 centimetres of oil on canvas. The gallery's catalogue gives it no date and no place, only the single word Landscape, and the year 1901 comes from the label beside it. A second Phokas in the same collection carries that same one-word title, larger and done in oil with pastel, and shows a completely different view.