Nude

This is academy work. Around 1877 Polychronis Lembesis was studying at the Munich Academy, where he stayed until 1879, and painting from the living model was the class students reached after the one where they drew plaster casts of antique statues. The National Gallery in Athens holds several of his figure studies from those years.

Munich is where nearly every ambitious Greek painter of the period went, which is why the whole generation is still filed under the name Munich School. What Lembesis did once he was home in 1880 went in another direction. He lived from portraits of comfortable Athenian families, then from landscapes of the countryside he had grown up in and from church commissions. This canvas is 87 by 116 centimetres, and the Gallery shows it in the main building.