Odysseas Phokas

From 1915 until his death in 1946, the man who cleaned, repaired and looked after the pictures of the National Gallery in Athens was himself a painter, and his own landscapes hang there now. Odysseas Phokas took the post of curator and restorer at 58 and kept it for 31 years.

He had come to painting sideways. He was born in 1857 in Romania, into a Greek family settled there, and in 1876 his parents sent him to Aix-en-Provence to read law. He ended up in the private academies of Paris instead, working under Raphaël Collin and Karl Cartier, two established teachers of the day. In 1885 he moved to Athens and earned his living as an illustrator for the magazine To Asty and the newspaper Akropolis. What he painted for himself was landscape, the dry light of Attica and the flat countryside of his Romanian childhood, and it brought him a bronze medal at the Paris world's fair of 1900.

Greek writers count him among the first to bring open-air work and impressionist light into a country whose painting was still mostly the brown studio tonality of the Munich-trained academics. His will left the gallery he had served everything he owned: 92 works from his own collection, a property in Kallithea on the southern edge of Athens, and an apartment in Paris.