Theodore Ralli

Theodore Ralli was born in Constantinople in 1852 to a prosperous merchant family from Chios. After completing his early schooling on Halki, he went to London to work in his family’s firm. In 1869 he resigned from Ralli & Mavroyanni and moved to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1873 to 1880. Better-known in France as Théodore Ralli, he adopted the Orientalist style of his teacher Jean-Léon Gérôme. In 1873 he took part in the Salon des Refusés. He exhibited regularly at the Paris Salons and as a member of the Société des Artistes Français. In 1876 he visited Greece and drew inspiration from provincial everyday life. He traveled extensively across Europe and Asia Minor, and to Egypt, Palestine, Algeria, and Syria. He visited Mount Athos in 1885 and published his journal from that journey in 1899. In addition to his Paris studio, he kept a studio in Cairo, where he lived for extended periods. He received distinctions at the Exposition Universelle in Paris (1889), the Olympia exhibitions (1888), and t the Athens International Exhibition (1903). He died in Lausanne in 1909. In 2014 the Benaki Museum of Islamic Art presented the exhibition "Theodoros Ralli: Looking East". Maria Katsanaki’s monograph on the painter was published in 2018 by the A.G. Leventis Foundation.