Nude

Lytras painted this in Athens somewhere between 1867 and 1870, in his first years as professor of painting at the School of Arts, and it belongs to the oldest exercise in academic training, the figure studied from life. The body lies along a couch covered in gold brocade, a white sheet beneath it and a dark red cushion at the head, turned away so that the face never arrives. Nothing around it sets a place or tells a story. The museum record carries no name for the model, and the title in the catalogue is the single word Nude. It entered the National Gallery later, through the bequest of Miltiadis Embeirikos. The signature is down in the lower left, written across the white of the sheet.