Nikiforos Lytras (; 1832 – 13 June 1904) was a Greek painter. He was born in Tinos and trained in Athens at the School of Arts. In 1860, he won a scholarship to Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Munich. After completing these studies, he became a professor at the School of Arts in 1866, a position he held for the rest of his life. He remained faithful to the precepts and principles of the Munich School, while paying greatest attention both to ethnographic themes and portraiture. His most famous portrait was of the royal couple, Otto and Amalia, and his most well-known landscape a depiction of the region of Lavrio. Biography Nikiforos Lytras was the son of a popular marble sculptor. In 1850, at the age of eighteen years he went to Athens to study in the School of Arts. He studied painting with Ludwig Thiersch and Raffaelo Ceccoli (c.1800-after 1860). After graduating in 1856, he began teaching an elementary course in writing. In 1860 with a Greek government's scholarship he went to Munich to study in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts where after some time, he succeeded in being accepted into the classes of Karl von Piloty. In 1862 after King Otto was exiled the scholarship was no longer available to Lytra so the expenses were undertaken by the ambassador of Greece in Vienna Simon Sinas. In the summer of 1865 before his return to Greece he met Nikolaos Gyzis in Munich. There they visited and studied art masterpieces. Following his return to Athens, Lytras became professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts in the department of Painting and he taught until the time of his death, some 38 years. Spyridon Vikatos was one of his pupils. For four years, starting in 1873, he travelled to Smyrna and Asia Minor, Munich and Egypt with Gyzis during which he produced a number of Orientalist works. In 1879 he married Irene Kyriakidi daughter of a tradesman from Smyrna and they had six children. His son Nikolaos Lytras followed in his footsteps by also studying at the Munich academy of Fine Arts and also heading the Athens School of Art. In later life he founded the 'Art Group', which many years later in 1919 exhibited in Paris, with participants including the engraver Demetrios Galanis, a friend of Derain, Braque and Picasso and a member of the French Academy. The