Charalambos Pachis

Charalambos Pachis kept a collection of Corfiot costumes in his studio for his pupils to draw from, and late in life he sold it to provide dowries for his daughters. The same interest in local dress runs through his best-known picture, May Day in Corfu, painted in the 1870s, where the island's holiday is set down with the costumes, the gestures and the architecture all recorded in detail.

He came to his training by accident. As a young man he worked as a servant in the house of a wealthy Englishman on Corfu, which was then a British protectorate. The employer saw his drawings and paid for him to study in Italy, at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome and afterwards in Naples. By the time he came back, in 1870, the Ionian Islands had been handed to Greece six years earlier and the British were gone.

He taught briefly at the Kapodistrias school in Corfu town, then opened his own, the first private art school on the island. Angelos Giallinas, Georgios Samartzis and Periklis Tsirigotis all studied there, and two of his daughters married painters. To the national exhibitions in Athens he sent history pictures, among them the killing of Ioannis Kapodistrias, the first head of state of independent Greece, and the fall of Souli in Epirus. A silver medal came for Arkadi, the Cretan monastery where the defenders blew up the powder store in 1866.