The Battleship 'Averoff' at Constantinople, c. 1921
Aimilios Prosalentis, who occupies an important place among Greek seascape artists such as Volanakis, Altamouras, and Hatzis, produced a series of superb depictions of various seas, which show not only the outstanding training which he received with his painter father, Spyridon Prosalentis, but his fruitful assimilation of the plein air painting which he came to know in Paris during the time of his studies there. As an engineer officer in the Navy, spending his days and nights on board ships, he had the opportunity to study the sea in its various phases, at different times of the day, and to imprint on his works views of the ports and seas which he visited, as well as scenes from the history of the Navy.
During his stay in Constantinople, when, in 1921, the battleship Averoff put in there, and remained there until the Asia Minor Disaster, Prosalentis painted a series of works with views of the city with Hagia Sophia as their subject in which his chief interest was to render it as it changed on each occasion under the influence of the light. In the work The Battleship 'Averoff' at Constantinople, it is the movement of the water on a sea wrinkled by the light wind which interests the artist, and he conveys this by small successive brush-strokes which change their appearance as the light of the sun falls upon them.
