Street Urchin, 1917

Loukas Doukas, who died before his time, was an artist faithful to the rendering of the human figure. He lived during a transitional period in modern Greek sculpture, moving from neoclassicism to realistic depiction. From early on, he produced worthy examples, influenced primarily by his studies in Paris, where the plastic style of Rodin and his successors held sway.

In “Street-Urchin”, a picturesque street figure, the plastic doctrines of Rodin are combined with a naturalistic rendition of a realistic subject. The picturesque figure of the young boy with his cap, carved along with the base from a single piece of marble, projects out from the unworked lower part and is moulded with fluid contours and soft surfaces, where the stress is on the tranquility of the child’s features in contrast to the artist’s other compositions which adopt a violent, expressionistic distortion in order to correspond to the content of the subject.