Emmanouil Zairis

Between 1904 and 1930 Zairis showed at the Glaspalast in Munich 22 times. That was the city's huge iron and glass exhibition hall, where the Bavarian art establishment held its annual show, and in 1913 he took a gold medal there. Munich gave him a one-man retrospective in 1921.

He had arrived in the city in 1894 from Halicarnassus on the Ottoman coast, today's Bodrum, and entered the Academy in the class of Nikolaos Gyzis, the Greek painter who taught there. The Academy's polished genre manner did not hold him long. He settled on working people as his subject, women ironing, a fisherman throwing a cast net, a German peasant couple, and he took up the looser colour of the German painters around him.

In 1932 he moved back to Greece for good and ran the branch of the Athens School of Fine Arts on Mykonos. Athens gave him the Zappeion hall in 1934 for a show of more than 250 paintings, and in 1936 his work went to the Venice Biennale. He died on Mykonos in 1948. Seven of his pictures are in the National Gallery in Athens, among them a girl in a cabbage patch, painted at some point between 1915 and 1920.