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signed l.l.

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 Nelly Missirli for providing the catalogue note and additional information for this work.
PROVENANCE

Purchased by the father of the present owners; thence by descent in the family
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

F. Rok, A Panhellenic Art Exhibition in 1888, mentioned
Nea Estia, Issue 274, 15^th May 1938, p. 696
Anonymous, Exhibition Catalogue of Lytras' Works, 1933, p. 6, no. 38
CATALOGUE NOTE

According to Dr. Nelly Missirli: "It is probable that the present work was painted in Munich, and that it was inspired by the similar single figured genre scenes of the famous Düsseldorf School painter Ludwig Knaus. Knaus introduced this genre for the first time with a work created in 1856 in France, which showed a seated woman holding a cat in her arms. For this composition, Knaus in turn was influenced by the painting Woman with Spindle by the French realist painter Gustave Courbet. Many of Knaus's subsequent works followed this new genre, such as Shoemaker's Child as Nanny (see fig. 1), Fisherman with Rod and others.

Shoemaker's Child as Nanny of 1861 is of particular importance to Lytras' painting In the Kitchen, because it presents the same motif of a child holding a baby in its arms, acting as a nanny. The acute description and the sensitivity in the painting's execution blend both French and German merits. Following on from this work, Lytras painted many single-figured genre scenes and introduced this genre to Greece, where it was adopted by many of his students.

A certain grace in the atmosphere, borrowed from the French masters, and a striking luminosity in the treatment of colours became the artist's hallmarks, differentiating him from Nicholaos Gysis. Gysis painted a similar motif, Negro as Nanny (location unknown), in 1873, which was obviously influenced again by Knaus, whose work Gysis knew well, and whose work he initially imitated when he started to paint genre scenes, such as The Painter and his Model and Eros and the Painter.

In the Kitchen marks Lytras's work as a genre painter and bears witness to his skills both in composition and colour. Our painting must have been sold in Germany shortly after it was painted, explaining why it was not included in the Panhellenic Exhibition of 1888, in which Lytras instead submitted a later watercolour of the same subject (see fig. 2), which Georgios Viziinos describes colorfully in his study "The Visual Arts in Greece" in 1888. In the same year the watercolour was published in the Easter Acropolis magazine, bearing a Greek signature of the watercolour."

fig. 1: Ludwig Knaus, Schusterjunge als Kindermädchen (Shoemaker's Child as Nanny), 1861 @ Städtisches Museum Schwäbisch Gmünd
fig: 2: Nikiforos Lytras, In the Kitchen, a print of the watercolour that was exhibited and published in Easter Acropolis magazine 1888
fig. 3: Nicolaos Gysis, Grandfather and grandchildren, oil on canvas, 1872 @ Private Collection