House in a village
Dimos Braessas was a student at the School of Fine Arts in Athens in the first decade of the twentieth century (1903 - 1909), when the academic approach of the representatives of the Munich School was still in the ascendant. However, he soon turned towards plein air painting, in which rich, dense, thick paint, which the artist applied in bright, luminous shades, predominates. It would seem that the company of artists (such as Stelios Miliadis, Georgios Kosmadopoulos, Periklis Vyzantios) who had embraced the influences of French Impressionism affected Braessa, so that he abandoned studio painting and resorted to the open air.
House in a Village conveys the atmosphere of a house in a farming community, as that becomes apparent at a first glance. The whole picture - the simple house with the improvised pergola, people sitting in its shade, the two small groups on the left and right - has been painted with an obviously impressionistic approach, since it is not only the lightening of the colour range which marks it, but also an abstractive simplification on the rendering of the shapes.
