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Nikolaos Gyzis ( ; ; 1 March 1842 – 4 January 1901) is considered one of Greece's most important 19th century painters. He was most famous for his work Eros and the Painter, his first genre painting. It was auctioned in May 2006 at Bonhams in London, being last exhibited in Greece in 1928. He was the major representative of the Munich School, the major 19th-century Greek art movement.
In 1865, having won a scholarship, he went to continue his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, where he settled for the rest of his life. He was very soon incorporated into the Germany pictorial climate, and became one of its most characteristic representatives of the Greek artistic movement of the Munich School. This is expressed in the painting News of Victory of 1871, which deals with the Franco-Prussian War, and the painting Apotheosis i Thriamvos tis Vavarias (Apotheosis or Triumph of Bavaria).
From 1886 onward he was professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, and gradually turned from the detailed realistic depictions towards compositions of a singularly impressionistic character. His students included Jan Vochoc, Ernst Oppler, Fritz Osswald, Anna May-Rychter, Alfred Juergens and Stefan Popescu (Romanian painter).
At the beginning of the 1870s returned to Greece for a period of several years, after which he produced a sequence paintings with more avowedly Greek themes, such as the Carnival at Athens and the Arravoniasmata (Engagement Ceremony) and a little later the painting After the Destruction of Psara. Towards the end of his life, in the 1890s, he took a turn toward more religious themes, with his best known work of the later period being Triumph of Religion. Gyzis died in Munich.
Gyzis' painting The Secret School was depicted on the reverse of the Greek 200 Modern drachma banknote of 1996–2001.
The Athens neighbourhood Gyzi is named for him.
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