The Student

This was painted in 1868, the year after Ioannis Zacharias left Athens for the Munich academy and the studio of Karl von Piloty. Greek painting of those years mostly wanted villagers, shepherds and island customs. Here we are indoors in a town, and the National Gallery reads the boy as a pupil of the School of Arts in Athens, where Zacharias himself had trained until 1866. He sits among paintings and frames with an open folder at his feet, holding up a drawing he has taken out of it, which was how drawing was learned then, sheet by sheet from copies. The light comes through a window on the left, and the whole picture stays in ochre, green and brown. Zacharias was 23, and this is one of a handful of canvases he finished before illness ended his work a few years later.