As a young child, he began to attend lectures at the National Technical University in Athens, in which he officially enrolled in 1854. On scholarship from the Evangelistria Foundation of Tinos, he left for Munich in 1865 to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1872 he returned to Greece for two years, in the meantime travelling to Asia Minor. He returned to Munich permanently and regularly showed at the Glaspalast exhibitions. He received the bronze medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1878. In 1880 he became an honorary member of the Munich Academy and from 1882 he taught there as a professor. In 1895 he made his last journey to Greece. He painted the ceiling of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Kaiserslautern (1878-1880), as well as The Apotheosis of Bavaria for the Nuremberg Museum (1895-1899). In 1901 a posthumous exhibition was held at the Glaspalast as a tribute to the painters Leibl, Böcklin and Gyzis. In 1928, the Art Lovers Society in Athens held a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Iliou Melathron (Schliemann’s mansion).

A towering figure of the School of Munich, he produced a body of high-quality work of great diversity – from genre scenes to portraits to still-life paintings – where the realistic description does not rule out idealistic treatment. His allegories and large-scale religious visions established him as the herald of a new spirit, the precursor of Jugendstil, to which his involvement with the art poster belongs.