Middle Easterner with Fruit

In 1873 Gyzis and Nikiforos Lytras, a fellow Greek painter who worked alongside him in Munich, spent about three months travelling through Smyrna and Asia Minor. The National Gallery in Athens credits that journey with changing the way he handled colour and light, and this canvas, dated to around 1873, came out of it.

Most of the picture is given to fruit seen close up, split watermelon and melon, oranges, pomegranates broken open, piled on white cloth. Behind the heap a man in a turban leans over the table. Toward the right the paint thins out into brown drawing on bare canvas, so his raised hand and his robe stay at the stage of lines.

The canvas is 174 centimetres wide. It belongs to the collection of the Koutlidis Foundation and hangs in the part of the gallery given to Orientalism.