The curators of the City Museum of Rijeka first heard of the painter signing herself as Leo Littrow when they bought two paintings in 1997 from the legacy of the famous Rijeka Meynier family, the leading owner of the Rijeka Paper Mills Smith & Meynier for decades. These were two rather dark paintings from the 1880s – one with the motif of the Opatija fishing port of Dražica, the other with a scene from Venice. The painter had been unknown to Rijeka museologists for years because there was very little information about her, and in the hands of collectors and merchants they had seen only a few of her paintings from different periods of her activity. It was only with the cooperation of the City Museum of Rijeka and Kolhammer & Mahringer Fine Arts from Vienna that systematic research and illumination of the painter’s life and work began.
