Nicholas Gysis Greek, 1842-1901

Private Collection, Athens

Konstantinos Didaskalou, Der Münchner Nachlass von Nikolaus Gysis, Munich, 1993, pl. 339, Z999, illustrated
Nelly Missirli, Gysis, Athens, 1996, no 99, p. 152, illustrated

In his still lives, Gysis often chose to portray humble, everyday objects, such as loaves of bread, fruit, fish, fowl, simple flowers of the fields or a craftsman's tools. In a way he thus transposed the inherent modesty of the Bauerngenre (peasant genre) of his larger, figural compositions to his still lives. Fish is a case in point. The strong chiaroscuro of the painting presents a simple catch of whiting to dramatic effect. The light reflects off the silver skin of the fish. Each fold of skin is depicted with meticulous attention to detail, giving the fish a very real, three-dimensional plasticity against the unanimated, flat dark background.

Such was his talent that Gysis was renowned amongst his friends for his skill as a still life painter, even though he himself considered their execution a mere, if pleasant, pastime. In a letter to his father in law, Nicholas Nazos, of 1882 Gysis recounts how the verisimilitude of one of his still lives - a depiction of a plucked chicken - fooled his friends into believing that a real chicken was attached to his wall: "..In order to give you pleasure, I tell you that past autumn I painted (rather playing) a chicken plucked and hanging on the wall. With this small pleasantry I deceived many and especially fellow craftsmen. All interpreted it as true, above all my friend Defregger, who for a long time considered it as real, and who finally asked me to sell it to him." (Nicholas Gysis, 25 February 1882, as translated by George L. Farmakis, The Letters of Nicholas Gysis 1842-1901, 1996).