Portrait of an officer, c. 1910
Thaleia Flora-Karavia was one of the most outstanding women painters which Greece has produced, with a broad education and intellectual cultivation. He was educated at the Zappeio Girls' School in Constantinople, where her family settled, and later in Munich with Nikolaos Gyzis and Georgios Iakovidis, as well as in German artists' studios. Her many visits to Europe enriched her artistic experience, while her move to Alexandria after her marriage in 1907 to the journalist Nikolaos Karavias broadened her intellectual horizons. Her cosmopolitan life style gave her freedom of thought which can often be detected in the ease in which he functions in her painting, in terms of both style and subject-matter.
Portrait of an Officer, whose clothing is reminiscent of a military unit established in Egypt, where the artist lived and worked for a number of years, indisputably permits a confirmation of the capabilities of expression of Flora-Karavia and, more specifically, her special talent for sketching. The drawing of the form and of the drapery of the material with fine pencil lines and the use of pastels in the rendering of the facial features undoubtedly bring out the facility with which she worked with various techniques.
