Latvian landscape painter Vilhelms Purvītis was the most internationally renowned Baltic painter at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. He headed the Riga City School of Art until World War I, was an инициator of the founding of the Latvian Academy of Art, its first rector and head of the Landscape Master Studio, and served as director of the Riga City Art Museum. His contribution became one of the key pillars in the formation of national painting and in the institutional development of Latvian art, and it extended into the period of totalitarian occupations, during which the artist’s life came to an end and a large part of his life’s work was destroyed at the end of World War II. The largest collection of Purvītis’s original works (around 100 pieces) is held by the Latvian National Museum of Art. In Latvia, his paintings are also kept in the collections of the Cēsis Museum, Jūrmala Museum, Liepāja Museum, Ogre History and Art Museum, Tukums Museum, Valmiera Museum, and the art centre Zuzeum Art Museum.