Euaion Painter

Painters in Athens often wrote the name of a fashionable young man on their vases, followed by the word kalos, "handsome". One painter of drinking cups wrote "Euaion is handsome" so often that modern scholars named him after it. Most identify this Euaion with a son of Aeschylus, the great tragic poet of Athens, though the link cannot be proved.

The painter himself never signed. His style shows that he learned from Douris, one of the leading cup painters of the generation before, and he worked from about 460 to 440 BC. His figures are tall and slender, with small heads, and they rarely overlap. Besides cups he decorated small lidded boxes that held a woman's personal belongings.