Georgios Jakobides

On 28 July 1900, 258 paintings were handed over to Georgios Jakobides in Athens. They came from the collections of the University of Athens and the Technical University, and together with the bequest of the jurist Alexandros Soutsos they were the whole of the National Gallery, founded that year. Jakobides had just been called back from Bavaria by the Greek government to be its first curator, and he kept the post until 1918.

He had come a long way to that desk. Born in 1853 at Chidira on Lesbos, then Ottoman territory, he was sent at 13 to school in Smyrna on the Asia Minor coast, studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts from 1870, and in 1877 won a scholarship to the Munich Academy, where he worked under Ludwig von Löfftz and Gabriel von Max. He spent 17 years in Bavaria, and there he settled on the subject that made his name: small children, painted with the full apparatus of German academic technique. The First Steps of 1892, Grandma's Favourite of 1893, Cold Shower of 1898, the Children's Concert of 1900 — Greek schoolchildren still recognise them.

From 1904 he also ran the Athens School of Fine Arts, where he taught for 25 years, hostile to Impressionism and to everything that followed it. The collection he had been handed got its first real showing in 1915, when about 300 works went up in six halls of the Technical University building.