29. Périclès Pantazis (Greek, 1849-1884) Nature morte signé 'Pantazis' (en bas à gauche) huile sur toile 40.5 x 50.5cm (15 15/16 x 19 7/8in). signed (lower left) oil on canvas Provenance Christie's Athens, May 24, 2000, lot 63. Sotheby's London, May 10, 2007, lot 19. Private collection, Greece. A fine example of Pantazis's work, one of the most advanced and forward-looking pictorial premises in the history of Modern Greek art, this still life of colouristic dynamism and compositional rigour speaks of the bright prospects of an amazing artist who, despite his premature death at the age of 35, is considered a founding father of the 19th century Flemish school, along such figures as Guillaume Vogels and James Ensor.1 Deeply and inventively engaged in the art of still life, Pantazis skilfully combined acute observation and clarity of design with purely pictorial values, such as confident brushwork and bold modelling of form. Here, against a dazzling white frontal plane and a richly dark background, a grouping of seasonal fruit demonstrates his interest in handling form through colour and in evoking tactile roundness and tangible presence through close juxtapositions of varied hues. Ignoring conventional perspective and freely dispersed over the canvas in an arrangement whose coherence relates to the needs of art rather than to the need to describe, Pantazis's pears, apples, and quinces seem at once weight-bound and floating in space. Both serene and restless, sensuous and regimented, they expand and contact in response to one another like actors on a darkened stage. 1 See F. Maret, Les Peintres Luministes, Cercle d'Art publ., Brussels 1994, p. 9.