Middle Easterner with Pipe

In 1873 Gyzis travelled through Anatolia with Nikiforos Lytras, a fellow Greek painter based like him in Munich, and stayed several months in Smyrna, the Aegean port in what is now Turkey. This small panel of a man with a long pipe belongs to the work that came out of that journey. It measures roughly 40 by 31 centimetres, is painted on wood, and the Athens gallery dates it to around 1873. Writers on Gyzis treat those months in Asia Minor as the point where his colour and his handling of light changed. Outside Greece the picture usually appears under the title Oriental Man with a Pipe. It came into the collection with the bequest of Eleni Christomanou, the same bequest that brought the gallery his Spider.