(b Bruck na Muri [now Bruck an der Mur, Austria], 3 April 1865; d Zagreb, 9 Nov 1930). Croatian painter, printmaker, teacher and museum director, of Austrian birth. After graduating from the military academy in Vienna he studied painting at the academies of fine art in Vienna and Munich. In 1886–7 he painted sets for the Landestheater in Coburg. For a short time he taught painting in the School of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb, but he left in 1894 to take up a scholarship at the academy in Vienna, studying etching and engraving. He was the first artist in the Croatian graphic tradition to abandon a strictly linear style and use tonal variation to create contrasting areas of light and shade. He first established himself as a marine artist with a series of paintings of the Istrian peninsula and the Adriatic coast. In 1903, with the painter Bela Cikos-Sesija (1864–1931), he opened the first private painting school in Zagreb, which eventually developed into the Academy of Fine Arts. He taught there until the end of his life. He became a member of the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1919 and was the Director of the Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters from 1920 to 1928. His early work shows the influence of the Realism characteristic of the Munich circle of painters and uses a subdued palette, as in The Girl (1890) and Old Men Shelling Corn Cobs (1891; both Zagreb, Gal. Mod. A.). While painting his coastal landscapes en plein air, he gradually used bolder and brighter colours, and the influence of the Zagreb Colourist school of painting led by Vlaho Bukovac is also evident. Crncic is unsurpassed as a marine painter in Croatian art (e.g. Island of St Mark and The View from Plasa).