The Army Camp of Karaiskakis

In April 1827 the Greek army was camped at Phaleron on the coast below Athens, trying to break the Ottoman siege of the Acropolis. The rock is in the picture, small and pale on the horizon at the left, and the whole camp is turned towards it. Georgios Karaiskakis, the commander in central Greece, stands on the high ground pointing that way while his men wait below among the tents and horses, a priest blessing them at the right.

Vryzakis was not at Phaleron. Painting this in 1855, he took the faces from drawings made on the spot by Karl Krazeisen, a Bavarian officer who had sketched the Greek captains from life during the war, so the heads on the ridge are real portraits. Karaiskakis and Makrygiannis are among them, with the Scot Thomas Gordon and the Englishman Frank Hastings, who had brought a steam warship into the fighting.

Karaiskakis was shot in the stomach on 22 April 1827 and died the next day. The attack went ahead without him two days later and ended in a rout, and the Acropolis garrison surrendered in June. In the foreground a fighter rests against a block of ancient marble.