Katarina Ivanović
1811–1882 · Serbian painter from the Austrian Empire
Katarina Ivanović (Veszprém, 1811 – Székesfehérvár, 1882) was a Serbian painter from the Austrian Empire, regarded as the first Serbian woman painter in modern art history. Born into a middle-class family, she grew up in Székesfehérvár, the town she returned to and where she died.
She first studied in Budapest and then enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1835. Her training continued at the Academy in Munich between 1843 and 1845, and she travelled to Italy, France and Holland. From 1846 to 1847 she worked in Belgrade, painting portraits of prominent figures of the day, including Princess Persida Nenadović and Voivode Stevan Knićanin. In the following years she lived in several places, among them Paris and Zagreb.
Her style sits halfway between Biedermeier and Romanticism. She brought new subjects to Serbian painting, notably genre scenes and still life. She also tried historical composition, as in The Conquest of Belgrade (1844–45), but she achieved most as a portrait painter, and her self-portraits are especially valued. Her portrait of Sima Milutinović Sarajlija (1840) is among her known works.
Her career also had an institutional side. In 1876 she became the first woman member of the Serbian Learned Society and helped found the National Museum in Belgrade. She bequeathed most of her paintings to the museum, where they were transferred after her death. She is remembered today as a pioneer of Serbian art.
Works (1)
Where to see the work
- National Museum of Serbia Belgrade · 1
Curiosities
Verses and articles from her circle
Before her Belgrade years, Ivanović had already attracted attention in the literary and press circles around her. The poet Sima Milutinović dedicated a poem to her in 1837, and Teodor Pavlović wrote about her in the newspaper Serbski Narodni List. These tributes show how her contemporaries saw her while Serbian cultural life was still taking shape.
A late transfer
After her death in Székesfehérvár in 1882, her remains were moved in 1967 to the Belgrade New Cemetery. Eighty-five years after she died, the city where she had worked in 1846 and 1847 received her remains, a gesture that underlines her place in the country's memory.
Lost works
Her known work consists of 48 paintings, and ten of them have been lost. Most of her paintings were bequeathed by her to the National Museum in Belgrade, which received them after her death. This bequest explains much of the surviving body of work now associated with that institution.