Oltos

Around 525 BC, a painter in Athens had two techniques to choose from, the old black figures on orange clay and the new red figures left in the colour of the clay against a black ground. For a few years some cups carried both. Oltos began with exactly that kind of cup, black-figure in the round picture inside and red-figure on the outside, and then moved to red-figure for good.

He signed his name as painter, Oltos egraphsen, "Oltos painted", on two cups, one now in Berlin and one in Tarquinia, north of Rome. Cups were his speciality, and about 150 works are attributed to him. He seems to have started in the workshop of the potter Nikosthenes and went on to paint for at least six different potters. With one of them, Pamphaios, he produced the earliest known stamnos, a wide-shouldered jar for wine.

His drawing is spacious and elegant, with rich ornament and symmetrical compositions. On an amphora in the British Museum he set a single figure on the black with no frame around it and no line for it to stand on.