Leopold Loeffler

Leopold Loeffler
Artist at his studio (feather-pen behind his ear) pouring himself "A glass of wine", Leopold Loeffler, oil on canvas (fragment)
Born	(1827-10-27)October 27, 1827 Rzeszów, Poland
Died	February 6, 1898(1898-02-06) (aged 70) Kraków, Poland
Education	Academies of Fine Arts in Vienna, Munich, Paris

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the members of the Kraków and Warsaw art societies, and frequently reprinted in popular periodicals owing to their historical references to Polish national uprisings and battlefronts, as well as their great attention to period detail.

A member of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts since 1866 and at the height of his artistic career, Leoffler was invited to Kraków by Polish national painter Jan Matejko in 1877. There he accepted a position as professor at the expanding School of Fine Arts, but nevertheless remained a prolific artist for the rest of his life. Loeffler died in Kraków in 1898. His work can be found in the National Museum of Poland, its regional branches and in the Lviv National Art Gallery

Leopold Leoffler was born on October 27, 1827 in Rzeszów under the Austrian Partition, the son of an administrative officer Jan Leoffler (surname also Germanized as Löffler), and his wife Domicella née Dąbrowska. 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.