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PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION

THE NAUGHTY GRANDCHILD

68 by 98cm., 26¾ by 38½in.

signed l.r.

oil on canvas

The present work will be included in the forthcoming Nikiforos Lytras monograph being prepared by Dr Nelly Missirli.

We are grateful to Dr Nelly Missirli for her assistance in the cataloguing of this work.

PROVENANCE

Private Collection, U.S.A

EXHIBITED

Athens, Panhellenic Exhibition, 1888, as The Bad Grandson

LITERATURE

Nina Maria Athanasoglou, Nikiforos Lytras 1832-1904, Athens, 1976, p. 254, illustrated, as The Bad Grandson

NOTE

The Naughty Grandchild is among the most significant nineteenth century paintings to be offered at auction in recent years. Known only to scholars from an old photograph (see Fig. 1), the painting was altered by the artist and later sold to a private collector at the turn of the century. The reworked painting was never photographed making its re-appearance at auction an exciting event for both scholars and collectors. An X-radiograph confirms the artist's re-workings. It is apparent from the pentimenti visible in the X-ray that the earlier impression underneath relates to the old black and white photograph.

The family unit held special significance for Lytras. Many of his genre works weave anecdotes around children in ways that celebrate their optimism, youth and good humour. In this painting a grandmother in traditional Greek dress calls out to her partially clothed grandchild who has run into the courtyard to play.

Lytras is considered together with Nicholaos Gysis (see lots 16 & 42) and Georgios Jakobides (see lots 19 & 47) a seminal figure of the so-called school of Munich. Various factors - not least the socio-political connection of Greece and Bavaria - led to an exodus of young artists to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, during the late nineteeth century. There they built on the foundations of German academicism and Greek classicism, establishing a new iconography of modern Greece.

According to Nellie Missirli, "Though Lytras brought with him the basic principles of German genre painting, it was in Athens that he basically worked in concert with the manifest demand for the uniqueness of the nation. Responding to a Greek society which, despite urbanisation, had remained to a large extent rural, he created a kind of genre painting which was based on life in the countryside and on episodes taken from daily life in the provinces. This form became discernible as the embodiment of the concept of Greekness and the transferral to images of folk customs and manners." (Marina Lambraki-Plaka, Four Centuries of Greek Painting, Athens, pp. 69-70).

Fig. 1, The present work before Lytras reworked the composition--dig ref 037D06100

Fig. 2, Nikiforos Lytras, The Carol Singers, circa 1872, Private Collection---dig ref 038D06100