Spring Symphony

In a letter of 1897 Gyzis told his former pupil Anna May that he had hung this canvas beside the piano she had given him. Music is the subject. Winged figures in long blowing clothes carry harps, lyres and violins, some still in the air, some already down on the flowering ground, and the line between sky and earth is left unclear. He finished it in 1886 and sent it to the international exhibition in Munich in 1888, then to the Paris world's fair of 1900, where it hung alongside another of his allegories, The New Century. Athens saw it only in 1928. The collector Antonios Benakis, who founded the Benaki Museum in the city, bought the painting in 1922 and gave it to the National Gallery, which shows it today in the rooms devoted to symbolism and allegory around 1900.