Giovanni Battista Lampi (1751 – 1830)

• Was an Austrian-Italian historical and portrait painter.
• Johann Baptist Lampi was born at Romeno in the County of Tyrol to Matteo, or Matthias, Lampi, a decorative painter.
• He studied art under his father in Verona and later in Salzburg.
• In 1773 he went to Trento, where he learned to become a portraitist in canvases and miniatures.
• He travelled to Innsbruck, then to Vienna, where the Emperor Joseph II appointed him a professor at the Vienna Academy in 1786.
• That same year, he was invited to Warsaw by the court of King Stanisław II Augustus.
• He worked in Warsaw until the complete military Partitions of Poland.

• In 1791, he moved to St. Petersburg where the Empress gave him a hereditary knighthood.

• In Russia he devoted himself to portrait painting, and amassed a large fortune.
• He returned to Vienna in 1797 and became its honorary citizen in 1799.
• Pensioned in 1822, he died at Vienna on February 11, 1830.

• Both of his sons were also accomplished painters.

• The older one was Johann Baptist the Younger and his younger son, Francesco, or Franz Xaver.

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