Grove Koger

June 29 is the anniversary of the death of Greek artist Konstantinos Volanakis, widely regarded as the “Father of Greek Seascapes,” who died on this day in 1907.

Volanakis was born in Iraklion, Crete, in 1837. As a young man, he moved to the Adriatic port of Trieste (at that time part of the Austrian Empire) to work with relatives who were merchants, and they in turn encouraged him to pursue art when they saw the sketches of ships he had made … even though the sketches were in their account books! As a result, he was able to study alongside several other Greek students, including Nikolaos Gyzis, Georgios Jakobides, Nikiphoros Lytras and Polychronis Lembesis, at the Academy of Fine Art in Munich.

Volanakis’s breakthrough came when he won an Austrian competition in 1869 to memorialize the July 20, 1866, Battle of Lissa (above), in which the ships of the Austrian navy had defeated their Italian counterparts near the island of Lissa, or Vis, off the southern coast of what’s now Croatia. The prize involved a monetary award and free passage on Austrian naval ships for several years, the experience of which firmly encouraged Volanakis’s interest in marine subjects.

Volanakis married in 1874, but since Munich’s cold winters were affecting his wife’s health, the two returned to Greece, where they settled in Piraeus, the port for Athens. The artist accepted a position at the Athens School of Fine Arts and began work on a commission from the Greek Ministry of Shipping to depict the Battle of Salamis of 480 BCE, in which Greek forces defeated those of the First Persian Empire. Subsequently, he was invited to present the canvas (below) at the Greek Court. Poor health forced Volanakis to retire from the Athens School in 1903, but he continued to teach at an “artistic center” he had founded in Piraeus in 1895.

In 2008, Bonham’s Gallery in London held what it called The Greek Sale, explaining that “ever since his studies at the Munich Academy, Volanakis perceived the seascape as a complex entity, a homogenous whole with unlimited expressive potential, allowing him to seek the ideal balance between nature’s elemental forces and man’s will to master.” The gallery went on to note that, in Piraeus, the artist “had the opportunity to observe and render the atmospheric changes, the delicate nuances of the seascape and the soft gradations of light and shade with great accuracy and finesse.”

Another exhibit followed a decade later, at the B. & M. Theocharakis Foundation in Athens. Writing about Konstantinos Volanakis: The Father of the Greek Seascape, a curator noted that the artist “set his sight on depicting the sea as if he sought to reveal its secrets, the authentic truth resisting time’s relentless flow, and finding eternity.” 

To me, Volanakis’s recreations of historic naval engagements are not particularly interesting; they look too much like the many other crowded paintings (by many other artists) of similar events. Of greater interest, I think, is his lively depiction of the opening of the Corinth Canal on July 25, 1893, which you see at the top of today’s post. Even better, however, are his more serene paintings, such as The Disembarkation (above) and the lovely Boats in a Port (below). It’s in these works that he reveals the “delicate nuances of the seascape” and the “soft gradations of light and shade” which Bonham’s gallery referred to.

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