The Supplication

This is from the very end of Ralli's working life. The museum fixes no year on it and dates it only to about 1905 to 1909, the last stretch before he died at Lausanne, and by then a woman praying in front of an Orthodox icon stand was a subject he had handled for some 30 years, gathered in Greek churches and finished in the studio. The picture is tiny, 35 by 27 centimetres, and everything in it is close to the viewer. One more thing worth knowing before you look for it. It does not hang in Athens. Since 1982 the National Gallery has had a branch in Sparta, in a neoclassical house given to the state by the children of the collector Ioannis Coumantaros together with his pictures, and this small canvas is down there.