Shepherdess

A shepherd girl was about as Greek a subject as a painter could choose in the decades around 1900. Greek writers of those years were filling magazines with village stories and Greek painters were turning out rural scenes by the hundred, a taste critics there still call ethography. The word in the Greek title, voskopoula, came with its own history: a Cretan pastoral poem of that name was first printed in 1627 and stayed in circulation for centuries. Ralli worked mostly abroad and kept returning to subjects like this one between the Eastern pictures that paid him. The gallery cannot date it. It is small and horizontal, 27 by 35 centimetres, and hangs in the central building in Athens.