The Straw Hat

The date on the Gallery's label is not firm, about 1925. What places the picture is the handling. A young sitter in a broad straw hat stands in front of a whitewashed island courtyard, the paint laid on thick with sweeping strokes left exactly where they landed, and colour doing the work that drawing used to do. Scorched orange-yellows fill the upper half, the burnt summer ground, with cool blues and greys underneath, and the museum reads that pairing as the heat itself. It also notes how calm the result stays, which is rare for painting done at this pitch. The National Gallery calls the canvas one of the boldest works of early Greek modernism, and takes its closed horizon and upward push as an ideogram of a Greek summer on an Aegean island, most likely Tinos, where the Lytras family came from.