Franciszek Ksawery Lampi

Franciszek Ksawery Lampi
Study for a portrait
Born	22 January 1782 Klagenfurt, Austria
Died	22 July 1852(1852-07-22) (aged 70) Warsaw, Poland
Education	Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Known for	Painting, art education
Movement	Romanticism

Franciszek Ksawery Lampi, also known as Franz Xaver Lampi (22 January 1782 – 22 July 1852), was a Polish Romantic painter born in Austria of ethnic Italian background. He was associated with the aristocratic circle of the late Stanisław 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 Napoleon's defeat in Russia.

Lampi was the son of renowned Italian historical painter Johann Baptist von Lampi the Elder from Romeno (b.1751) known as Jan Chrzciciel Lampi in Poland, who was invited to Warsaw by King Stanisław II August in 1786 when Franz (Franciszek) was 4 years old (or between 1788 and 1791, according to different source).

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 (b.1775), 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 Füger. When he was 15 years 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 of 32 after the Napoleonic Wars, and settled in Warsaw a year later in 1815. The already well-established reputation of his father in Poland as well as his own Polish childhood helped him blend into society.