Josef Pitter

Around 1910 printmaking in Bulgaria had almost no trained teacher, and the man who filled that gap came from Bohemia. Josef Pitter, born in 1881 in Kostelec nad Černými lesy, near Prague, had learned his trade the hard way, working as a lithographer in a Smíchov printing house before studying at the applied-arts schools of Prague.

In 1909 he moved to Sofia and taught graphic arts at the State School of Arts and Crafts until 1913, effectively the first academically trained printmaker to teach in the country. One of his plates survives in the National Gallery in Sofia, an aquatint of the old church of Saint Sofia, made in 1910, the church that gave the city its name.

He returned to Bohemia and died young, in Prague in 1925, at 44.