Pavel Petrović

Pavle Petrović also variously spelled Pavel Petrovits, Paul Petrovits, Paulus Petrovitz, Paulus Petrovits and Pablo Petrovits (Serbian Cyrillic: Павел Петровић: Temesvár, Kingdom of Hungary (now Timișoara, Romania), 1818 - Rome, Kingdom of Italy, 14 June 1887) was a Serbian painter. He can be considered among the first 19th-century European-trained painters who decided to make a living by traveling for forty-year across all continents, leaving portraits behind him that capture the best of European Romanticism of the time. His works can be found in museums and private collections in Serbia, Romania, England, India, China, the United States of America, Hawaii, Chile, Peru, Canada, Australia, Egypt, and Italy.

While travelling to Australia in April 1881, Petrović’s second wife, Elizabeth, suddenly died. Police chief Frederick Standish investigated suicide and found no foul play, though the press still spread rumours overseas that would haunt Petrović's reputation for years to come, eventually contributing to his marginalization altogether.

In the beginning, Petrović was not well-known in his country of origin until Serbian art historian Miodrag Marković began in 2015 researching his life and work.

Early life and education

He was born Pavle Petrović in 1818 in Timișoara (Temesvár), the capital city of today's Romanian Banat, which was at that time a part of the Kingdom of Hungary, in the Austrian Empire (hence he was also mentioned as a Hungarian, Austrian, Romanian and even Russian and Polish national in some obscure sources). His father Sava Petrović (1788-1861), an accomplished painter, seeing in his son a predilection in painting, made sure that he got the best academic training in art. Sava and his wife Maria Sibeslov came originally from a nearby village of Izvin and settled in 1814 in Timișoara's suburb Fabrika, where the majority of the population was Serbian at the time. They had three sons, Nikola, Vladimir, and Pavle, the youngest and the only one who took up his father's profession.