Leopold Loeffler

Leopold Loeffler, also spelled Löffler, (October 27, 1827 – February 6, 1898), was a Polish realist painter of the late Romantic period popular in the second half of the 19th century under the foreign partitions of Poland. Lithographic reproductions of his paintings were widely distributed among the members of the Kraków and Warsaw art societies, and frequently reprinted in popular periodicals owing to their historical references to Polish national uprisings and battlefronts, as well as their great attention to period detail. His father was an office manager locally before moving his family to Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine) in order to take up the position of a district secretary. Leopold went to school in Radymno, where his uncle Filip Loeffler was a post-master. Upon graduation, he enrolled at the Department of Philosophy of the Lwów University. At about that time, he also rediscovered his interest in painting and in 1845 left the partitioned Poland for Vienna, to continue his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts there. The battle was lost in an ambush attack, a dishonorable act by the rules of knighthood. Most importantly, it also took away the Czech hopes of freedom for centuries to come. Such ideologically motivated depictions of imperial history of Austria-Hungary did not contribute to Loeffler's popularity in his native land under the foreign domination.

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