Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro was a Portuguese painter, engraver and ceramist who came from a family of artists. His father, who trained him, as well as his brother and sister were also artists. From 1873 to 1876, he attended the art academy in Lisbon. A patron financed a study visit to Paris from 1881 to 1883. Officially, he was a pupil of Carolus Duran in Paris, but he continued his education autodidactically at the Louvre. Bordalo Pinheiro is regarded as a representative of a visionary realism influenced by Romanticism. In 1882, he exhibited for the first time at the Paris Salon and received good reviews. From 1883, he lived in Lisbon again, where he was in great demand for still lifes, landscapes, history paintings and portraits. Along the way, he also worked in printmaking and ceramics. From 1901 to 1922, he was a professor at the Lisbon Academy of Art, and in addition, he became also director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in 1914.