The academy-trained painter Vlaho Bukovac left for North and South America in 1866 and began his painting career working in the towns of Peru, as well as in San Francisco. He returned to his homeland in 1876, after which he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and studied under professor Alexandre Cabanel from 1877 till 1880. Until 1886, he worked in Paris in his own art studio. Bukovac spent 1886 and 1888 in England, while from 1893 to 1898 he lived and worked in Zagreb (during this period he founded the Croatian Artists Association in 1897). Afterwards, he returned to Cavtat and ultimately left for Vienna. In 1903, Bukovac took the post of associate professor at the Art Academy in Prague, and in 1910 he became a full professor where he taught for the rest of his life. In 1904 he became a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy. He was elected President of the Medulić Association in Split in 1908 and was a corresponding member of the Yugoslav Academy in Zagreb from 1919.

Bukovac was the most prominent personality of Croatian visual arts life at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. He paved the way for new perspectives in Croatian modern painting. He occasionally held exhibitions with Croatian artists and Czech visual arts associations. Bukovac also organized exhibitions independently in 1915 and 1921. Using the pointillism method and a refined scale of colors he tried to create a vibrant atmosphere of form and ambient by establishing new light-and-color relationships.