Ioannis Altamouras

The king who paid for his training was a Dane. George I had been born a Danish prince, a son of Christian IX, and was put on the Greek throne in 1863. In 1873 he sent a 21-year-old marine painter to the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, where Altamouras worked under Carl Frederik Sørensen, the leading Danish painter of ships and open water.

His first lessons had come from his mother. Eleni Boukoura-Altamoura, from a shipowning family on the island of Spetses, was the first Greek woman to train as a painter, and she had done it in Naples dressed as a man, enrolled under the name Chrysinis Boukouras. Her Italian husband, the painter Francesco Saverio Altamura, left when Ioannis was seven, and she brought the boy and his sister to Athens.

In the summer of 1876 he was at Skagen, the fishing town on the northern tip of Jutland where Danish painters had just begun working outdoors on the beach. The Danish painter Michael Ancher, who became his friend there, called 1876 the Altamura year in his memoirs — in Denmark he went by the Italian form of his father's name. Altamouras came home with tuberculosis, settled on his mother's island, and kept painting northern harbours and Greek seas from memory until he died there in May 1878, at 26. Two of his canvases were hanging at the world's fair in Paris that year.