Sailing Ships

Painted in 1886 and held in the National Gallery of Athens, this work represents Volanakis in mature command of his art, producing the kind of sailing ship composition he had perfected over decades. Sailing ships occupied a special place in Greek Romantic sensibility: they connected modern Greece to ancient maritime tradition, to the Homeric voyages and Argonautic expeditions that were the founding narratives of Hellenic civilization, while also representing the working present of a maritime nation whose merchant fleet was commercially vital. By 1886 steamships were increasingly dominant in Mediterranean trade, lending traditional sailing vessels a retrospective quality — they were becoming symbols of a passing world even as they remained economically active. Volanakis, who spent his career painting Greek waters, understood this transition and the elegiac dimension it gave to paintings of full-rigged ships under sail. The National Gallery's acquisition of this work placed it in the context of Greek national art, affirming that marine painting — long considered a specialty of northern European traditions — had found a distinctively Greek voice in Volanakis's hands.

Full-rigged sailing ships under canvas present complex problems of rendering — the interplay of multiple sails at different angles, the rigging lines crossing between them, and the relationship of all this to the wind-driven sea below. Volanakis handles the sails with understanding of how canvas belly and strain under wind, using warm light to model their curved surfaces. The sea beneath shows the movement that the sails imply, consistent in its direction and energy.