Portrait of George Averoff, 1874

Born into the Prosalentis family of artists, Spyridon studied initially, like the other artists in the family, at the school of painting set up by his sculptor father, Pavlos Prosalentis, in Corfu, then going on to the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, where he remained until 1865. He belongs among those artists who tried to bring European thought to Greece and to introduce the Enlightenment through art. He concerned himself chiefly with portraiture, and secondarily with genre painting. He worked within the context of the realistic style of the period, and his portraits are marked by the amiable manner of the subjects, as well as the artist's attempt to portray their pyschological and intellectual strengths and weaknesses.