Woman with Tambourine

The catalogue entry says only "before 1905", which is the museum stating exactly what it can prove. Ralli died at Lausanne in 1909, and the following year the National Gallery in Athens received his bequest, a group of paintings left to a country he had spent his career away from. Several of them arrived with nothing written on the back, so the record gives a limit instead of a date. The instrument here is a frame drum with metal jingles set into the rim, the defi, played from the Greek islands across to Egypt, and the picture belongs to a class he produced steadily for the Paris trade. One figure, one costume, one prop, no incident. The canvas is 35 by 22 centimetres and hangs in the main building on Vasileos Konstantinou Avenue.