The Vow

Gyzis came back to this subject four times. He painted it first in 1874, then again in 1875 and 1876, each of those upright, with the two women filling the canvas. The version here, from 1886, turns the picture on its side and gives the middle of it to a mass of rock. The women, a mother and her daughter, are pushed over to the right, near the end of a climb made to keep a vow, the kind of promise to a saint that was ordinary practice on Tinos, the island where Gyzis was born. The daughter is in black. A red poppy is worked into the scene, and candles and the sea lie below the two figures. High on the rock at the right the words faith, hope and love are cut into the stone, and the painter signed his own name on a stone in the foreground.