Vasilios Chatzis Greek, 1870-1915

D. Staikos, Athens

A student at the Athens School of Fine Arts under Nikiforos Lytras (see lot 8) and Konstantinos Volanakis (see lots 6, 11, 15, 18 and 44 ), Chatzis is known for his depiction of boats and life at sea. His dramatic representations of maritime life through the use of virtuoso brushwork made him one of the most accomplished painters in Greece. In the present work, Chatzis succeeded in fashioning his personal artistic idiom rooted in plein air painting. According to Marina Lambraki-Plaka "The exodus from the shadowy workshop to the brilliant light of the outdoors was a revelation for painters. There they became aware that the image of nature was being transformed by the flow of time and the change of light, that strong, natural colours bore no relationship to the browns, greys, and whites of traditional landscape painting, that the academic technique, laborious and slow, was inadequate for conceiving of things in their flow and interpreting nature as a continual state of becoming and not just an event. Thus impressionism was born. (...) Their paintings glow with luminosity, pulse and colour and transmit to the viewer the vitality of euphoria" (Marina Lambraki-Plaka, ed., Four Centuries of Greek Painting, Athens, 1999, p. 352).