The Port of Volos

Around 1875, when this small canvas is dated, Volos was not in Greece. Thessaly was still Ottoman territory, and the harbour was the sea door of the Thessalian plain, shipping its grain and wool out to Constantinople, Smyrna, Alexandria and the ports of western Europe. Greece took the province over only in 1881, under a convention signed at Constantinople. The town that changed hands then held fewer than 5,000 people, and by 1907 it held more than 23,000.

So the border ran through this view. A Greek painter was working on the harbour of a city his own state did not yet govern, and the shipping in it moved under Ottoman customs.

Volos kept pulling him back. He returned to the same water repeatedly, including a much larger harbour scene by moonlight now in the National Gallery in Athens. This one is modest beside it, about 32 by 48 centimetres.