Peasant girl or Greek girl, before 1880

The work Peasant Girl or Young Greek Girl very clearly bears the marks of the apprenticeship of Nikolaos Vokos with Nikiphoros Lytras at the Athens School of Fine Arts. This work must have been produced towards the end of Vokos's student days, as is demonstrated by similar works by artists who attended Lytras's classes in the period 1871 - 1880. It shows a young Greek village girl in her local everyday costume - a long white poukamisa, a brown waistcoat, and a broad black and red cummerbund. Her stance is almost full-frontal; the face is thoughtful, the eyes melancholic. In this work, as in similar works by his fellow-students, the warm tonicities of the colours betray the influence of his teacher Lytras, while at the same time they soften the emotional tension. But it is not only the elaboration of the colour which links the student with the teacher. It is above all the projection of the single human figure against a dark, usually indeterminate, background, while emphasis is placed on the costume, the objects and the narrative motifs which accompany it. In spite of the fact that within the framework of genre painting, the initial aim was the recording of a specific moment in everyday life, in the end, by the simplicity and the inner truth contained in it, the work expresses an idea which is given shape by this artistic formulation.