Portrait of Mrs Serpieri

In 1864 an Italian engineer, Giovanni Battista Serpieri, set up a company at Lavrion, south of Athens, to work the slag heaps left there by the silver miners of ancient Athens. The old furnaces had not got everything out, and smelting that waste a second time for lead and silver made the Serpieris very rich. In 1869 Nikiforos Lytras painted Serpieri's wife, Clémence, standing life size on a canvas nearly two and a half metres tall. She wears wine-red velvet and a black lace shawl, with pearls at her throat, star-shaped ornaments in her hair, a half-open fan in one hand and a great fluted column beside her. A single white rose lies on the carpet near her hem. That same year the Greek state began contesting who owned those ancient heaps, a quarrel that reached parliament in 1871. When the National Gallery in Athens brought little-known works out of its stores in 2011, its director picked this as the picture that stole the show. It had come to the Gallery as a gift from a member of the family, Ioannis V. Serpieris.