Corfiot Woman and Young Man

A small picture, 25 by 20 centimetres, oil on canvas laid down on panel, showing a young man and a woman in Corfiot dress. The commissions that made Dionysios Tsokos known in Athens were of a different order. He was born on Zakynthos, trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice under Ludovico Lipparini, settled in Athens in 1847, and spent the following decade on the oath of the Filiki Etaireia, the society that prepared the 1821 rising, on the killing of the governor Kapodistrias, and on portraits of men who had fought the war, painted to order. In 1856 he was made drawing master at the Arsakeio school in Athens, and he died in 1862. The National Gallery's own catalogue gives no year for this one, and the picture reached Athens with the collection of the Koutlidis Foundation, which the gallery holds and exhibits.