Octoberfest

The Oktoberfest Volanakis saw in 1876 had no beer halls in it. The tents that everyone pictures today only arrived in 1896. Before that the Theresienwiese, the meadow outside Munich named after the bride whose 1810 wedding started the whole thing, was covered with small beer stands, shooting galleries and the carousels that German fairground men were building bigger every year through the 1870s. A horse race still closed the festival, the way it had at the start.

He was living in Munich then, a Greek painter who had made his name on water, and for once the subject in front of him was a crowd on dry land. The canvas is shaped for it. At 60 by 130 centimetres it is more than twice as wide as it is tall, the format a painter chooses when the interesting thing is the spread of a crowd across a field rather than any single figure in it.

The Greek catalogues usually list the picture under a plainer name, Festival in Munich, which is closer to what a visitor of 1876 would have called a day out on the Wiesn.