Shepherd with Baby Goat, 1856

A work that came into the National Gallery collection in 1949, with the bequest of Nicholaos I. Iliopoulos, “Shepherd with Baby Goat” is a characteristic piece by Georgios Fytalis, dating from his period of study at the Athens School of Fine Arts. The work had been submitted at the Kontostavleios competition, in 1856. Both the Fytalis brothers entered the competition, in which their works received an equal number of votes and they shared the first prize. Only Georgios’s work was cast in marble, though.

“Shepherd with Baby Goat” combines the typology of ancient Greek sculpture with neoclassical idealisation, and the meticulous rendition of individual elements with the realistic qualities of an early, for Modern Greek sculpture, genre approach.