Franciszek Ksawery Lampi

Franciszek Ksawery Lampi, also known as Franz Xaver Lampi , was a Polish Romantic painter born in Austria of ethnic Italian background. He was associated with the aristocratic circle of the late Stanisaw II Augustus, the last Polish king before the foreign partitions of Poland. Lampi settled in Warsaw around 1815 at the age of 33, and established himself as the leading landscape and portrait artist in Congress Poland soon after Napoleons defeat in Russia.

He was born in Klagenfurt, where his father worked on commissions for the Austrian court. He was the younger brother of Johann Baptist von Lampi , also a portrait painter in the Lampi family and was initially taught painting by his father, before entering the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in the studios of Hubert Maurer and Heinrich Fger. When he wasyears old, the Lampi family relocated to St. Petersburg in 1797 during the third and final partition of Poland, enticed by an extremely generous offer from the Tsar. Estranged from his father, and disinherited, Franciszek Lampi left St. Petersburg at the age ofafter the Napoleonic Wars, and settled in Warsaw a year later in 1815. The already wellestablished reputation of his father in Poland as well as his own Polish childhood helped him blend into society.

Source: Wikipedia