Ewald Arndt-Ceplin

Ewald Arndt-Ceplin was a German painter who spent his career far from Germany, on the cultural frontiers of the late Habsburg and Balkan world. Born in Merseburg in 1865, he turned up first in Austrian-run Sarajevo in the 1890s, drawing for the literary and arts review Nada and joining the city's young painting circle, then teaching drawing at the high school in Tuzla, another Bosnian town, until about 1911.

From there he went to Sofia, the capital of newly independent Bulgaria, where he taught drawing and helped found a society for the support of art, one of the early efforts to build a public for painting in the country. His own work ran to landscapes, from open-air studies to the decorative Art Nouveau then in fashion, though contemporaries thought him strongest as a portrait draughtsman, quick to catch a face. He worked as much as an illustrator as a painter, which is how most of his surviving work reaches us, on the printed page.