Woman at Fountain

The National Gallery dates this canvas to about 1908 or 1909, which makes it one of the last things Ralli painted. He died in the autumn of 1909, at 57.

The subject is as plain as it sounds, and the Greek word in the title carries the detail. A vrysi is a spout of running water set into a wall or a rock, the ordinary village supply. There is no jet and no ornamental basin. Until piped water reached the Greek countryside, that spout was where a household's water came from, fetched in jars, and where the women of a place met each other several times a day.

He had been painting Greek village women for 30 years by the time he made this, on a canvas 61 by 38 centimetres.