Vigil of the Dead Pasha of Tangiers

In 1884 Morocco was still an independent sultanate, and Tangier was the one city in it where Europeans were properly installed, because the sultan held his court inland and kept the foreign legations down on the coast. Ralli painted this for Paris and showed it at the Salon as La veillée du pacha, the pasha's wake.

A dead governor lies on a terrace above the town, barefoot, dressed in white, his turban still on his head. Two men keep the vigil. One kneels and reads from the Quran, the other has simply stopped. A dog sits apart with its head raised. The gallery's own commentary points at what visitors notice first, the way the whole picture is divided into deep dark zones and pale grey-blue ones, with moonlight showing faintly high in the sky.

The canvas is 116 by 191 centimetres, and it reached Athens as a gift from the collector Georgios A. Gaitanos rather than out of the painter's studio.