Dionysios Vegias

The Ionian Islands in the 1830s were a British protectorate with a parliament of their own in Corfu, and that administration paid for a young painter from Argostoli on Kefalonia to finish his training in Rome. Vegias had begun with Pavlos Prosalentis, the sculptor who ran Corfu's first art school, and in Rome he studied at the Accademia di San Luca, the old painters' academy there, keeping himself with copies of Renaissance pictures.

He came back to Corfu in 1839, taught drawing at Prosalentis's school and later took charge of it. The single work of his in the National Gallery in Athens is Dance in Corfu, painted in 1842. Elsewhere he went from portraits to a Danae of 1870, a mythological nude that almost nobody in the islands was attempting.

He worked as a church painter too, making icons and wall decoration, and in 1862 he sent work to the International Exhibition in London. He died in Corfu in 1884, by which time the islands had belonged to the Greek kingdom for 20 years.