Roman Petrović

Roman Petrović was born in 1896 in Donji Vakuf. His father was Ukrainian, his mother Polish. He attended high school in Sarajevo and Mostar. His father, Ivan, was an official in Austro-Hungarian Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also an amateur painter. Enthusiastic about his son's painting talent, he sends him to study in Petrograd. He did not stay in that city for long, but continued his studies in Krakow, Zagreb and Budapest, where he finished his studies.

He lived in Paris from 1925 to 1927. As a professional painter, he could have lived much better and had greater success in Ljubljana, Zagreb or Belgrade. At the beginning of the 20th century, Sarajevo did not have any special artistic tradition. Apart from the third-rate painters who arrived in the city during the Austrian occupation and the first generation of Bosnian-Herzegovinian painters, Bosnia and Herzegovina had no painters. However, Roman Petrović loved Sarajevo more than himself and rarely experienced moments of understanding in that city. There was no job for him in the schools. In order to survive, he worked on theater sets, painted frescoes and icons for iconostases in Orthodox churches, illustrations for books, commissioned portraits. With his realism of predominantly expressionistic tendencies, he influenced younger Bosnian painters, Ismet Mujezinović and Mica Todorović.

He is one of the founders of the Association of Fine Artists of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Petrović is one of the most important Bosnian-Herzegovinian visual artists. Next to him are Vojo Dimitrijević, Ismet Mujezinović, Daniel Ozmo and Mica Todorović. He died in Sarajevo in 1947. A gallery in Sarajevo bears his name. According to official data, 165 of his works are stored in the Art Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina.