Portrait of a Lady with Feather

Around 1850, when this was painted, Athens had been the capital of an independent Greece for some 16 years, and a painter there who needed an income painted portraits. Georgios Margaritis had come back from Paris in 1836 with training in painting and lithography, and he taught the first painting classes at the Evelpidon military academy. Most of what survives by him is a gallery of named men from the war of 1821, among them Rigas Pheraios, Markos Botsaris and Karaiskakis riding up to the Acropolis. The woman here has no name attached to her at all. She sits in Western dress with a feather, the look an Athenian family of the young kingdom wanted on record, smoothed the way Margaritis smoothed every face he painted. The canvas is small, 58 by 46 centimetres, and it reached the Gallery with the Koutlidis Foundation collection.