Janis Rozentāls

Janis Rozentāls is the painter Latvians tend to name first when they think of their own art. He was born in 1866 on a farmstead in Courland, then a province of the Russian Empire, the son of a village blacksmith, and he left for Riga at fifteen set on becoming an artist before going on to the Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg.

What made him matter at home was a choice he shared with a small circle of young Latvian artists who called themselves Rūķis, the Gnome. In the 1890s, when Latvian was still a peasant language with little standing and the educated classes spoke German or Russian, they set out to build a national art by treating Latvian life, faces and folklore as serious subjects. Rozentāls first drew wide notice at the Latvian Ethnographic Exhibition of 1896, and went on to work across portraits, landscapes, mythological scenes and church commissions.

He settled in Riga, where his apartment became a gathering place for Latvian writers and artists and survives today as a museum. He died in Helsinki in 1916, at fifty.