Ioannis Zacharias

Zacharias was about 14 when he entered the School of Arts in Athens in 1859, the house the Fine Arts school later grew out of, and he stayed until 1866. Then he went where the ambitious Greek painters of his generation went, to the Academy in Munich, and from 1867 he worked in the class of Karl von Piloty, the history painter who trained most of those Greeks. Piloty thought well enough of him to put him forward for a scholarship.

Little came of it. Zacharias fell mentally ill and could not go on working. He died in 1873 in the mental hospital in Corfu, about 28 years old, the same year his work was shown at the World Exposition in Vienna.

What is left is a handful of portraits and genre pieces. The Student, painted in 1868, shows a boy bent over a drawing he has taken out of the case at his feet, a schoolroom subject at a time when Greek painting was busy with village life and the war of independence.