Nikiforos Lytras

Biography

In the summer of 1865, on the eve of his departure from Munich, Lytras met Nikolaos Gyzis there, who had just arrived to study with the same Piloty. For several days they went round exhibitions and museums, then made trips out to Bavarian villages.

Lytras was born in 1832 in Pyrgos on the island of Tinos, the son of a folk marble sculptor. The father, so the story goes, looked for work in the towns of the Balkans and settled on Tinos. In 1850, at eighteen, Nikiforos came to Athens with his father and entered the School of Arts. His painting teachers were its German director Ludwig Thiersch and the Italian Raffaelo Ceccoli. He graduated in 1856 and began teaching at the school at once, at first in an elementary course. In 1860 he won a Greek government scholarship and went to Munich, to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. It took him some time, but he was accepted into the class of Karl von Piloty, the leading figure of history painting in Germany. In 1862 King Otto was deposed and the scholarship stopped. The costs of his studies were taken over by Simon Sinas, the Greek ambassador in Vienna. In his Munich years Lytras painted pictures on subjects from Greek mythology and history, among them “The Hanging of Patriarch Gregory V”, “Penelope Unravelling Her Web” and “Antigone before the Dead Polynices”.

After returning to Athens he became professor of painting at the same school and taught until his death, for about thirty-eight years. His pupils included Georgios Jakobides, Periklis Pantazis, Polychronis Lembesis, Georgios Roilos, Nikolaos Vokos and Spyridon Vikatos. Many of them later took a different road from their teacher: he himself held to the principles of the Munich School and academic realism and remained indifferent to Impressionism, but, as is written, he advised his pupils not to close themselves off from new currents.

In 1873 he travelled with Gyzis to Smyrna and Asia Minor. The length of the journey and its routes are described differently: by some accounts it took three months, by others four years, and in different versions the itinerary includes Munich, Paris and Egypt. He visited Egypt, probably, in 1879. These journeys produced pictures with Oriental types: fellahin, hodjas, dark-skinned boys.

In the winter of 1879 he married Irene Kyriakidi, the daughter of a Smyrna merchant. They had six children. Their son Nikolaos also studied in Munich, became a well-known painter and later headed the Athens School of Art; Periklis, too, became a painter.

At home Lytras became the official portraitist of Athenian society. He painted full-length portraits of members of the Serpieri and Kautantzoglou families, of directors of the National Bank and of other prominent Athenians, and his best-known portrait is considered to be that of the royal couple, Otto and Amalia. Of his landscapes the best known is a view of the Lavrio region. He regarded genre scenes as the painter’s main business: in his words, an artist should devote himself to genre and to subjects that “move, delight and educate the people”. His works were shown at the World’s Fairs in Paris (1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, 1900) and in Vienna (1873), and at exhibitions at the Zappeion in Athens. In his last years his pictures show more old age, loneliness and thoughts of death. In place of slender girls came ascetic figures in black with waxen faces. In 1903 he was awarded the Golden Cross of the Order of the Redeemer.

Lytras died in Athens on 13 June 1904, at the age of 72. His chair at the School of Fine Arts was taken by a former pupil, Georgios Jakobides. In 1909, after the painter’s death, his works were shown in Munich at an exhibition of Piloty’s school, and in 1933 the Athens School held an exhibition of 186 of his paintings.