Sailing Ships

Nineteenth-century Greek harbours had very little deep water alongside, so a ship of any size lay out in the roads and everything reached the shore by rowing boat. That is what the foreground of this painting is doing. A man in a red shirt works the oars of a small boat, a second boat waits beside him under a red awning, and behind them the big sailing ships stand motionless with the sun low and directly behind their rigging, which turns the sky and half the water the same yellow. The picture is dated to the second half of the 1880s, when Piraeus was still dredging its harbour and building the quay walls that would finally let hulls come alongside. A mooring buoy floats at the lower right, the same red as the boatman's shirt.