Eleni Boukoura-Altamoura

Eleni grew up in a family with artistic interests: her father, the sea captain Ioannis Boukouris, supported her drawing and was associated with an early Athens theatre. She received lessons from the Italian painter Raffaello Ceccoli. In 1848 she travelled to Italy for further study. Accounts of her training record the male name Chrysinis Boukouris and male clothing as means of entering spaces closed to women. Her studies and travel brought her into contact with Italian academic painting, Renaissance works and the practice of copying earlier masters.

In Italy she married the painter Francesco Saverio Altamura. Their sons Ioannis and Alexandros also became painters; the National Gallery records that Ioannis received his first lessons from his mother. Returning to Athens in the late 1850s, she worked as a painter and teacher. The Arsakeio archive identifies her appointment in board minutes dated 15 September 1862, succeeding Dionysios Tsokos. This document places her within the professional work of art education. She later lived on Spetses and died there in 1900. Most accounts give her birth year as 1821, while her tomb inscription gives 1824. Her career connects the island, Italian training and women’s artistic education in the new Greek state.

Αυτοπροσωπογραφία (Self-Portrait), dated around 1850 in Dora Markatou’s scholarly study, shows the painter working at an easel. Dark clothing, a palette and the concentrated arrangement of the figure present her through the activity of making art. The image can be read as a statement of professional identity, rather than merely a likeness. Απελπισία (Despair), generally dated around 1850–1852, gives an abstract feeling the form of a draped female figure. Its controlled composition and expressive pose combine academic training with a Romantic interest in emotion.

Her Italian study albums preserved copies after Renaissance painters and architectural drawings. These studies show the patient work of looking, recording and learning from earlier art. Teaching at Arsakeio extended that practice into another setting: helping pupils learn drawing and painting. Only part of her output survives, so the paintings and drawings deserve attention on their own terms. The Benaki Museum’s 2011 Altamura family exhibition brought her work into conversation with that of Saverio, Ioannis and Alexandros. Galanaki’s 1998 novel gives the painter an imagined inner voice; its monologues belong to a literary construction. A painting, an archival appointment and a fictional scene answer different kinds of questions about her.

Her place in Greek culture is sustained by art-historical research, educational histories and Galanaki’s widely read novel. The Benaki family exhibition and catalogue also helped place her art alongside that of her relatives. The quotation on this page is Galanaki speaking about Eleni in a school discussion, not a surviving statement by the painter.

Look at the self-portrait and use the graded passage to identify πορτρέτο, καβαλέτο and παλέτα. Write two sentences with κρατά and σκούρο, then locate light and shadow with φως and σκιά. Separate what you see from what you imagine the sitter feels. Finally, label a claim as visible detail, historical document or fiction. This B1 task links painting vocabulary with careful reading in Modern Greek.

• Arsakeio’s archive records her appointment on 15 September 1862.
• The painter Ioannis Altamuras first learned from his mother.
• Rea Galanaki’s Eleni, or Nobody is a novel, not the painter’s autobiography.