The modern Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico was born in the port city of Volos in the Grecian province of Thessaly. After training in Athens and Munich, he lived briefly in Milan and Florence before moving to Paris in 1911. There, between 1911 and 1915, he developed the highly original, ‘metaphysical’ style of painting on which his reputation is chiefly founded. With this singular idiom––epitomised in his 1914 painting The Enigma of a Day––and the critical support of Guillaume Apollinaire, he established himself as one of the luminaries of the Parisian avant-garde, alongside Pablo Picasso and André Derain.