Collection's title

Girl with the pigeons, before 1879

Girl with the pigeons, before 1879
Girl with the pigeons, before 1879
Artist
Lembesis, Polychronis
(Salamina 1849 - Athens 1913)
Share the page
Υλικό
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
120X80
Source
-
Description

The Girl with the Pigeons must have been produced in the last year of the artist's stay in Munich, in 1879, as is to be concluded from a comparison with another of his dated paintings, Rabbits, which is in the National Gallery. Another feature which points to this dating is the fact that a similar work was produced by the painter Adolf Echtler, a fellow-student of Lembesis at the Munich Academy, which was exhibited the same year in the Glaspalast Exhibition with the title Memory of Venice. The fact that different painters concerned themselves with the same subject should come as no surprise, since artists often take a familiar theme as a starting-point for an exercise in composition or colour. In any event, the colour work confirms this conclusion. The carefully executed, smooth colour surfaces, with the soft transitions of tone which we see in Rabbits, in The Girl with the Pigeons are transformed into free broad brush-strokes, positioned spontaneously on the picture - a practice which came to be established in the work of Lembesis after his return to Athens.