Lot 50: Theodoros Vryzakis , Greek 1819-1878 Portrait of Helene Fourment oil on canvas

signed and dated 1846 on the reverse oil on canvas

72.5 by 59cm., 28½ by 23¼in.

Nelly Missirli & Stelios Lydakis, Treasures of Modern Greek Art. The Yannis Perdios Collection, Athens, 1998, pp. 92-93, no. 48, illustrated

Private Collection, Germany (acquired from the artist); thence by descent
Yannis Perdios Collection, Athens (acquired from the above)
Private Collection, Athens

This portrait repeats a work by Peter Paul Rubens in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich titled Hélène Fourment Putting on a Glove. Four years after the death of his first wife, Rubens married the sixteen-year-old Hélène Fourment, rumoured to be the most beautiful woman in Flanders.

This version of a painting by arguably the finest Baroque artist indicates the range of Theodoros Vryzakis' influences and his preparation for the creation of a comparable great Greek art tradition. Vryzakis was the first in a line of Greek painters who studied in Munich, nurtured on the ideas of the philhellene King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Vryzakis' works reflect the European intellectual stance at the time toward Classicism, Romanticism and Philhellenism, which inspired not only painters but also poets, writers, and men of arts and letters.