Victor Ioannides evinced his talent for portraiture while still at school. With quick and concise sketches, he managed to capture and put down on paper the human character. This skill led him – while still a student at the Athens School of Fine Arts – to become a cartoonist. Between 1923 and 1924 he worked drawing cartoons for Ελεύθερος Τύπος [Free press newspaper] and from 1925 to 1929, when he finished his studies, for Ελληνική [Greek newspaper]. In fact, together with Fokion Demetriadis, Antonis Protopatsis and Nikos Kastanakis, he founded the Athenian Newspapers’ Cartoonist Association. In Cyprus, he served as the editor-in-chief and cartoonist of the satirical newspaper Το Γέλιο [Laughter] (1936-1937).

Ioannides’ ability to observe, explore and interpret the human character also led him early on to pursue portraiture. Except for cases of commissioned works, he found his subjects mainly in his immediate milieu. Indeed, he had a penchant for depicting young girls. As in his landscapes and scenes from everyday life, so in his portraits did Ioannides soon forsake the dark colours and solemn air of academic portraitists and his teachers at the Athens School of Fine Arts, moving on to a fresh painting style with Impressionist influences.

Portrait of a Girl in the A. G. Leventis Gallery Collection depicts a young English girl, a neighbour of the artist. The character of the young girl is rendered with immediacy and acuity, but also with an economy of line – all virtues which he developed as a cartoonist. The artist built up the portrait with two contrasting colours. Leaving the background and the girl’s torso indistinct, he focused on the face, which he accentuated with skilful lighting. The strong contrast between light and shadow, which splits the face in two, lends drama and intensifies the sadness emanating from the young girl’s eyes. With this chiaroscuro, Ioannides went beyond the result of a natural phenomenon to a fundamental principle, that of the eternal coexistence of the positive and the negative.