May Day in Corfu

The street is Nikiforos Theotokis, in the old town of Corfu, and the day is the first of May. A man holds up a young cypress trunk dressed with ribbons, flowers and fruit and topped with a blue cloth, musicians play beside him, and shopkeepers, labourers and children stop to watch. Until 1864 Corfu was the seat of a British protectorate over the Ionian Islands. The islands then joined the Greek kingdom, and Pachis, a Corfiot who had studied at the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome and come home in 1870, painted the May procession of his own town in the decade that followed, when island custom had become Greek material. The National Gallery in Athens dates the canvas to about 1875 to 1880, and it is a small thing, 61 by 50 centimetres, with ochre walls and the green shutters of the old town behind the crowd.