Iakovos Rizos

In 1875 a young Greek painter showed a portrait at the Paris Salon, the city's great annual exhibition. It was a woman in black silk with violet sleeves, listed simply as "Miss R.", and one reviewer counted it among the finest portraits in the show. The painter was Iakovos Rizos, known in France as Jacques Rizo. He had come from Athens to study under Alexandre Cabanel, the academic master who had painted Napoleon the Third.

His name carried weight at home. His grandfather and namesake, Iakovos Rizos Neroulos, was a playwright and statesman who served as Greek foreign minister and became the first president of the Archaeological Society of Athens in 1837. The grandson settled in Paris for good and stayed until his death in 1926. He exhibited at many Salons and at the world's fairs of 1878 and 1900, taking a silver medal at the second for a picture now in the National Gallery in Athens. He also kept sending work home, to the Zappeion hall exhibitions in Athens in 1888 and 1889.

Rizos watched Impressionism rise at close range. He counted Renoir among his friends and admired Degas, yet he kept the polished finish and the rules he had learned from Cabanel. His real subject became elegant women of the Belle Époque, the prosperous decades around 1900, shown reading, resting on couches or walking in gardens. The Athens gallery holds 18 of his works, among them a lady in a garden with her dog. Only in a handful of landscapes, such as a view in Picardy, the countryside north of Paris, did he take up the open-air manner of his Impressionist friends.