Description
Attributed to Eleni Boukoura-Altamoura (1821-1900) – Painting “Patra Achaia Claus 1851”, oil on wood.
The frame is not in good condition.
Dimensions: 32.0 X 50.0 cm (without frame). Dimensions: 45.0 X 63.0 cm (with frame).
Biography:
Eleni Boukoura-Altamoura (Spetses, 1821 – Spetses, March 19, 1900) was a 19th-century Greek painter, whose tragic life became the subject of a novel, Eleni or Nobody by Rhea Galanakis, and a play.
Boukoura-Altamura was the daughter of captain Giannis Boukouras or Boukouris, later the first theater director of Athens. Even as a child, she stole candles and drew her friends who posed for her in the courtyard of the girls’ school. Her father, recognizing her talent, hired the professor of the School of Arts, Raffaello Ceccoli, as a tutor at home. With his letter of recommendation, Eleni left for Italy in 1848 to study.
In Italy, she attended painting classes in Naples, Rome and perhaps Florence, disguised as a man. She fell in love with the Italian painter and Garibaldi revolutionary Francesco Saverio Altamura and had three illegitimate children with him: Ioannis, Sophia and Alexander. In order to legitimize her relationship with Altamura, she converted to Catholicism and married him. But, in 1857 her husband left her and left with his mistress, her English painter friend Jane Benham Hay, taking with him their youngest son, Alexander (Alessandro Altamura).
Boukura-Altamoura then returned to Greece with Ioannis and Sophia, and began giving painting lessons to girls in Athens. However, in 1872 her daughter fell ill with tuberculosis and she was forced to go to her brother’s house in Spetses in order to get a change of air for her sick child. Finally, Sophia died at the end of 1872 at the age of only 18. After her daughter’s death, Boukoura-Altamoura returned to Athens.
In 1876, her son and rising painter Ioannis Altamouras completed his studies in Copenhagen and returned to Athens, filling his exhausted mother with joy. But her joy was short-lived: Ioannis also contracted tuberculosis and died in May 1878. The loss of the two young people caused a nervous breakdown in their mother and drove her to madness. At the age of about 60, Bukura-Altamura returned to Spetses, where she died almost unknown in 1900. She was buried in the cemetery of Agia Anna in Spetses, but later, her bones, like those of Sophia and John, were moved by the her descendants in the A΄ Cemetery of Athens in a common grave of the Boukouras-Altamouras family.
It is rumored that before she died she burned all—or almost all—of her paintings, although one version has it that her works were destroyed by relatives cleaning out her house after her death.
Eleni Boukoura-Altamoura (1821-1900) – Painting “Patra Achaia Claus 1851” – An exceptional and collectible painting.
Code: E1036
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