Angelos Giallinas

In 1886 Angelos Giallinas showed his watercolours on his own for the first time, in Athens, and one of the visitors was Clare Ford, the British envoy in the Greek capital. Ford began ordering albums of views from him, of Venice, Spain, Rhodes and Constantinople, and arranged a London exhibition that ran from 1891 into 1892. That is how a painter from Corfu came to work for King George I of Greece and to sell to the king's sister Alexandra and her husband, the future Edward VII.

Watercolour was a deliberate choice. He had trained on his own island with Charalambos Pachis, who ran the first private art school in Corfu, then spent three years in Venice, Naples and Rome, where he settled on the medium, and returned to Corfu in 1878. The island gave him most of his subjects for the rest of his working life: gardens, harbours, the Venetian fortresses, the sea. He also worked on the decoration of the Achilleion at Gastouri, the palace that Elisabeth, empress of Austria, built outside Corfu town around 1890, and in 1902 he opened an art school of his own there.

He painted Athens as well. His watercolour of 1895 in the National Gallery there looks across at the Temple of Hephaestus on the ancient marketplace, called the Theseum in his day, with the Acropolis rising behind it.