Notes

The academic painter Prof. Othmar Ruzicka was born in Vienna as the son of a Bohemian railway employee and a mother from Ritzendorf, Weinviertel (in the north-east of Austria). Ruzicka graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna , his teachers were Julius Victor Berger , August Eisenmenger and Kasimir Pochwalski . In his works he preferred motifs from South Moravia , Slovakia and Lower Austria . During the First World War he was assigned to the Imperial and Royal War Press Office as a war painter , where he worked on the Balkan front in Albania .

From 1907 he was a member of the Vienna Künstlerhaus , where a collective exhibition of his works took place in 1956. Ruzicka received several awards in the course of his artistic career. In 1913 he received the Small Golden State Medal for his oil painting Slovak Peasants ; in 1914 the Drasche Prize for the oil painting The Confession and in 1947 the Golden Laurel of the Vienna Künstlerhaus; in addition he was awarded the title of professor in 1949.