Théodore Ralli

Ralli Brothers was one of the great Greek merchant houses of the 19th century, trading from London to Bombay, and Théodore Ralli was brought up to work in it. Born in Constantinople in 1852 into that family from Chios, schooled there and then in England, he was put behind a desk at the firm's offices in London and Manchester. His father died in 1871. In January 1873 he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme, the most successful painter of Eastern subjects in France.

He stayed in France for the rest of his life and became one of Gérôme's strongest pupils, showing at the Paris Salon from 1875 and at the Royal Academy in London from 1879. The Société des Artistes Français, the body that ran the Salon, gave him an honourable mention in 1885 and a silver medal in 1889. Most of what he painted was the world he came from: interiors of Orthodox churches, village women in Greek dress, street corners in Cairo, where he kept a studio and spent his winters from 1891 to 1904. In August 1885 he spent two weeks on Mount Athos, the monastic peninsula in northern Greece, drawing Byzantine work.

France made him a knight of the Legion of Honour in 1900. He died at Lausanne in Switzerland in 1909 and was buried in the First Cemetery of Athens, and he left the Société des Artistes Français a fund for an annual painting prize that still carries his name.