Katarina Ivanović

Katarina Ivanović (15 April 1811 – 22 September 1882) was a Serbian painter from the Austrian Empire. She is regarded as the first Serbian female painter in modern art history.^[1]^[2]

Biography

Ivanović was born in Veszprém in the Austrian Empire to a middle-class family, and grew up in Székesfehérvár. She initially studied painting in Budapest and enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1835. Her friends and supporters included Teodor Pavlović, who wrote about her in Serbski Narodni List, and Sima Milutinović, who devoted her a poem in 1837.^[3]

Ivanović traveled to Italy, France and Holland, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich between 1843-1845.^[4] She worked in Belgrade from 1846 to 1847. In later years, she spent a lot of time traveling and living at different places, including Paris and Zagreb. Ivanović returned and died in Székesfehérvár in 1882. Her remains were transferred to Belgrade New Cemetery in 1967.^[3]

Work and legacy

She brought new themes to Serbian painting: Genre art and still life.^[1] She was stylistically in between the ideas of Biedermeier and Romanticism; she tried her hand at painting historical compositions but had her greatest achievements as a portrait painter.^[1] Of special note are her self-portraits.^[1] As the first educated Serbian painter, in february 1876 she became the first woman member of the Serbian Learned Society^[5] and one of the founders of the National Museum in Belgrade.^[1]

She bequeathed most of her paintings to the National Museum, where they were transferred after her death. Her work known to date consists of 48 paintings, ten of which have been lost.^[6]