Louise Catherine Breslau
German-Swiss painter (1856-1927)
Louise Catherine Breslau (6 December 1856 – 12 May 1927) was a German-born Swiss painter, who learned drawing to pass the time while bedridden with chronic asthma. She studied art at the Académie Julian in Paris, and exhibited at the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, where she became a respected colleague of noted figures such as Edgar Degas and Anatole France.
Biography
Early years
Born Maria Luise Katharina Breslau into an apparently-assimilated Munich-based German Jewish family of Polish Jewish descent. In 1858, when Breslau was two years old, her father accepted the position of professor and head physician of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Zurich, and the family moved to Switzerland. In December 1866, Dr. Breslau died suddenly from a staph infection contracted while performing a post-mortem examination. Suffering from asthma all her life, Breslau turned to drawing as a child to help pass the time while confined to her bed. She spent her childhood in Zürich, Switzerland, and as an adult made Paris her home where she also stopped using her first name "Maria".
Lydia Escher (1858–1892) was a friend of Louise Breslau.
Education
After her father's death, Breslau was sent to a convent near Lake Constance in hopes of alleviating her chronic asthma.
“Louise Catherine Breslau” enters the record as german-Swiss painter (1856-1927). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Louise, Catherine and Breslau can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q270629. VIAF identifies the subject as 44482045. The Library of Congress control number is no2002001744. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1856, 1927, 1858 and 1866.
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This entry incorporates text from “Louise Catherine Breslau” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.