Andokides Painter

Nobody knows this painter's name. Around 530 BC he decorated vases in Athens for a potter called Andokides, who signed several of them as their maker, and modern scholars named the painter after him. His drawing suggests he learned from Exekias, the leading black-figure painter of the day.

He is usually credited with turning Athenian vase painting inside out. Until then figures were painted as black silhouettes on the orange clay, with the details scratched in. In red-figure the background is painted black and the figures are left the colour of the clay, so the details could be drawn with a brush. Some of his amphorae carry the new technique on one side and the old one on the other, and the black-figure halves are now generally given to a colleague, the Lysippides Painter. He tried other things too. Some of the earliest uses of a white ground on Athenian vases appear in his scenes, and an amphora of his in the Louvre shows women bathing and swimming.