(b Varia, Lesbos, c. 1868; d Lesbos, 20 March 1934). Greek painter. The grandson of an icon painter from Lesbos, he settled around 1890 in Smyrna where he started painting to earn his living. In 1897 he was in mainland Greece as a volunteer in the Greco-Turkish war. From around 1900 until he returned to Lesbos in 1926 he worked as a travelling craftsman in Volos and the village of Mt Pelion, decorating the walls of houses, shops, windmills and inns. Regarded by local society as a fool, his work went unappreciated and all these buildings, with the exception of Kontos’s house in Volos where he painted a 100 sq. m mural, have long since been demolished, resulting in the disappearance of a large proportion of his life’s work. Theophilos was discovered by the Greek cultural community of Paris. In 1929 Tériade, prompted by Giorgos Gounaropoulos, went to Lesbos to meet him. Launched in Paris by Tériade in 1936 as the Greek equivalent of Henri Rousseau, he won high praise from Le Corbusier, and his personality came to symbolize the aspirations of the Greek avant-garde of the 1930s. The force of these aspirations was again evident in the controversy surrounding the retrospective exhibition of his work at the British Council in Athens in 1947; this turned into an ideological struggle between the right-wing establishment and the progressive intelligentsia, who saw in Theophilos the model of authentic Greekness.

• Theophilos (c. 1868-1934)
  • Greece, §III: Painting
  • Greece, §IX: Patronage