Roman aqueduct, c. 1906-1907
Thaleia Flora-Karavia was one of the most outstanding women painters which Greece has produced, with a broad education and intellectual cultivation. He was educated at the Zappeio Girls' School in Constantinople, where her family settled, and later in Munich with Nikolaos Gyzis and Georgios Iakovidis, as well as in German artists' studios. Her many visits to Europe enriched her artistic experience, while her move to Alexandria after her marriage in 1907 to the journalist Nikolaos Karavias broadened her intellectual horizons. Her cosmopolitan life style gave her freedom of thought which can often be detected in the ease in which he functions in her painting, in terms of both style and subject-matter.
In the work Roman Aqueduct, she goes beyond the realistic academic approach of her early student years to arrive at a kind of painting with strong expressive colours and contrasts which she applies with viscous brush-strokes, defining the masses in accordance with the German version of impressionism. The work must have been produced during her many trips to Europe, mainly in the early twentieth century, and it is not impossible that she brought it with her from Italy around 1906 - 1907.
