Georgios Jakobides

Jakobides was born on 11 January 1853 in Chidira, a village on the island of Lesbos, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1870 he went to Athens to study at the School of Arts (the forerunner of the School of Fine Arts), where he trained as a sculptor as well as a painter. In 1877 a scholarship took him to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, the city that was then the art capital of central Europe and the second home of Greek painting: Nikolaos Gyzis and Nikiforos Lytras had studied there before him, and the realist, finely finished style they brought back is known in Greece as the Munich School.

He stayed in Munich for twenty-three years. He studied under Ludwig von Löfftz and Wilhelm von Lindenschmit, opened his own studio, married and raised a family there, and won medals at exhibitions in Munich, Berlin and Paris. It was in Munich, in the 1880s and 1890s, that he painted the scenes of children and grandparents that made his name with German and Greek buyers alike.

In 1900 the Greek state called him home to organise the newly founded National Gallery (Εθνική Πινακοθήκη) in Athens, of which he was the first director, serving until 1918. From 1904 he also taught at the Athens School of Fine Arts, which he directed from 1910 to 1930, shaping a whole generation of Greek painters. He died in Athens on 13 December 1932.

Jakobides painted in the polished realist manner of the Munich academy: careful drawing, warm brown interiors, a single source of light, and faces caught at the exact moment of an emotion. What he brought to it was a subject and a sense of humour. Again and again he painted the small dramas of the nursery and the battle of the generations. In «Η ψυχρολουσία» (The Cold Shower, 1898) a woman pours water over a naked toddler who screams with every muscle of its body. In «Τα πρώτα βήματα» (First Steps, 1893) a grandmother holds out her arms to a child who is about to let go of a chair. In «Το άτακτο εγγόνι» (The Naughty Grandchild, c. 1884) an old man has clearly lost control of the situation.

The best-known of all is «Παιδική συναυλία» (Children's Concert, 1900), painted in his last Munich year and now in the National Gallery in Athens: a band of children with a toy trumpet, a drum and whatever else comes to hand produce a terrible racket, while a baby in the middle takes it all very seriously. The painting is funny, tender and technically dazzling, and it is the image most Greeks have in mind when they hear his name.

After his return to Athens his subjects changed. He painted portraits of Athenian society, flower still lifes and some landscapes of Attica, in a lighter palette; they are accomplished, but it is the Munich children that Greeks love.

The first thing to do is to stand in front of the Children's Concert in the National Gallery in Athens, where several of his best paintings hang together; the picture is also reproduced on posters, postcards and school art books, and many Greeks grew up with a print of it at home or at their grandparents'. On Lesbos, his native village of Chidira has a Digital Museum Georgios Jakobides, opened in 2008, which presents his life and his paintings on screens in the place where he was born. In Greek art history his name comes right after Gyzis and Lytras in the list of the Munich School, and any Greek schoolbook on nineteenth-century art shows at least one of his howling or giggling children.

• He was born under Ottoman rule on Lesbos and spent his youth in Athens; the island only joined Greece in 1912, when he was almost sixty.
• He trained as a sculptor as well as a painter and made several portrait busts.
• He was the first director of the National Gallery of Greece (1900–1918) and then director of the Athens School of Fine Arts for twenty years.
• His most famous picture, the Children's Concert, was painted in Munich in 1900, the very year he moved back to Greece for good.