Francesco Pige

For years the portraits of Hydra's shipowning families sat in Greek collections under the name of Andreas Kriezis, a portraitist of the young Greek kingdom. Then the inscription on one of them was read. It was made on Hydra in April 1857 and it says Francesco Pige di Tirolo pinxit, painted by Francesco Pige of the Tyrol. Pictures in the same hand could be reassigned from there, and the National Gallery in Athens now holds 12 works under his name.

Pige was born in 1822 at Grins, a village in the Tyrol, then part of the Austrian Empire. He studied painting in Munich from 1842 to 1845, spent three years in Rome, and then settled in Greece, where he made his living from the island families whose ships and crews had carried the war of independence of 1821.

His sitters stand stiffly and formally, with an archaeological site, a monument or a city set in behind them, a manner that came out of German and Flemish portrait painting with the antique references of his own day added. Among those 12 works there is a landscape as well, Corfu with the Fortress, painted after 1848. He died around 1862, and the exact date has never been settled.