Nikiforos Lytras Greek, 1832-1904

Private Collection
Sale: Christie's, London, 29 November 1985, lot 41
Private Collector, Athens (since 1985)
Martinos, Athens (purchased from the above)
Private Collection, Athens (purchased from the above)

(possibly) Palligenesia, Athens, 30 December 1872, cited
Nelli Missirli, Gysis, Athens, 1996, p. 345-346, illustrated

"The artist should devote himself to genre paintings and to the works that are related to what stirs, delights and educates the people... The customs of our Greek people brought Liberty and must be protected like the apple of one's eye." Nikiforos Lytras (quoted in Marina Lambraki Plaka ed., Four Centuries of Greek Painting, Athens, 1999, p. 271).

A Festival in Megara must be counted among the most significant Greek nineteenth century paintings to be offered in recent years. Considered the "father" of Greek art Lytras completed the present work circa 1872.

By the early 1870s Lytras was at the height of his artistic powers completing two of his most famous paintings, The Carol-Singers and The Abducted Maid. It seems likely that A Festival in Megara was executed at that time as the work is almost certainly referred to by Palligenesia in 1872.

Lytras is considered together with Nicholaos Gysis (see lots 12, 16 and 100) and Georgios Jakobides, as a seminal figure in the so-called school of Munich. Various factors - not least the socio-political connections of Greece and Bavaria - led to an exodus of young artists to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich, during the later nineteenth century. There they built on the foundations of German academicism a new iconography of modern Greece.

A Festival in Megara is a kaleidoscope of colour and movement. The central figure, a young woman in traditional dress, dances in a village street surrounded by an array of men, women and children. As an academic painter Lytras brought to Greek art the basic principles of German genre painting that he studied in Munich. The rigorous training at the Munich academy taught painters such as Nicholaos Gysis, Nikiforos Lytras and Constantinos Volanakis (see lot 14) to paint with precision and attention to detail. 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." (ibid., pp. 69-70).

The plain of Megara lies between the Cerata /Pateras mountain range to the east and the Gerania range to the west. It was here during the third quarter of the nineteenth century that artists travelled to paint villagers in traditional costume, "by means of the nostalgic dream for a tranquil and carefree life which they then narrated in a poetic and lyrical style, and without suggesting in any way the difficulties that life held in the Greek countryside." (ibid., p. 71).

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