Georgios Jakobides

Louli-Kranioti, Athens
Sale: Stavros Mihalarias Art, Athens, 20 October 1987, illustrated on the cover of the catalogue
Private Collection, London

Painted circa 1875, this rare early work depicts a young street urchin at rest. Quite often Jakobides repeated his most successful compositions; this boy was also the subject of another work by Jakobides (Private Collection, Athens), but captured at a slightly different angle to the present work.

The present work captures the fleeting detail and has the immediacy of a life-study: the realism and proximity of the representation of this boy is a technical tour-de-force, and an exhibition of the skill that earned Jakobides a scholarship to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich a few years later. The depiction of a contemporary street waif is reminiscent of the subjects of Baroque painters such as Murillo and Caravaggio, and the precise rendering and intense chiaroscuro of Young Boy indicates a debt to the emotional realism of these European masters. Additionally, the present work shows the influence of Nikiforos Lytras, Jakobides' fellow member of the Munich School. This can be best seen in the palette's vibrant whites, resonant blacks and earth-tones, punctuated by the visceral red of the boy's vest.

In November 1870, Jakobides moved to Athens and enrolled in the Athens School of Fine Arts, and would study there until 1876. In 1877 he was awarded a scholarship and travelled to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, to study under the realist painter Karl von Piloty. Jakobides found great fame with his ethnographic paintings of children in a German academic realist style, and was invited by the Greek government to be the first curator of the National Gallery of Greece in Athens in 1900. In 1904 he was appointed Director of his alma mater, the Athens School of Fine Arts.