Washing Women at the River

Greek art of the 19th century has a word for a picture like this. Ethographia, literally the study of manners, was the name critics borrowed from literature for scenes of ordinary folk life, and it became the staple subject of the Greek painters trained in Munich. A riverbank of women doing the household wash was exactly such a subject. Laundry was carried to the river or the spring and done in company, outdoors, by hand, and it stayed that way in most of Greece well past 1900.

What surprises people is the size. The canvas is 14 by 26 centimetres, smaller than a sheet of writing paper, with several figures and a stretch of water fitted into it.

The painting carries no date, and it sits slightly apart from the harbours and fishing boats that make up most of Volanakis's surviving work.