Josip Kovačić, PhD, completed his studies in Yugoslav Studies and French Language at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb in 1959. He was a Croatian language teacher at the Teacher Training School in Čakovec and at the Fourth Gymnasium in Zagreb until 1980, when he retired. In the same year, he defended his dissertation titled “The Poetics of Ballad and Romance Based on Croato-Serbian and Hungarian Material.” He was a man of broad education and diverse interests, notably a nearly lifelong dedication to collecting and studying art. For this reason, Kovačić is considered one of the biggest art collectors in Croatia. He began collecting art in his youth, and after moving to Zagreb in the 1960s, he focused on acquiring works by unknown and overlooked artists, guided by the idea that “the spirit of an era is shaped not only by the most significant talents but also by a host of minor, or rather, forgotten masters (…)”. Consistently applying the method of collecting and studying “marginal phenomena,” which are the “unprotected area” in art history, Kovačić amassed approximately 4,000 items, a significant portion of which consists of works by women artists. “After many years, it became evident that the majority of those authors who, in my opinion, created quality works but were not classified as historically significant turned out to be women.” – is the insight upon which Kovačić gradually formed the Collection of Croatian Women Painters Born in the 19 th Century. In addition to his focus on a segment of Croatian artistic production that was little known not only to the general public, but also experts, Kovačić’s research-oriented approach to collecting is particularly significant. Characterized as “research-based collecting” , his effort to explore the material properties of artworks, the context of their creation, their provenance, and biographies of the artists expanded his collection beyond the artworks themselves to include extensive documentation about them and their authors. The Collection of Croatian Women Painters Born in the 19 th century – “a systematically gathered, dutifully managed, and thematically conceived whole”, was donated by Dr. Josip Kovačić to the City of Zagreb in 1988. He managed the collection until his death in 2017, organizing numerous exhibitions of its works throughout Croatia. In 2022, the management of the Collection of Croatian Women Painters Born in the 19 th Century was taken over by the Zagreb City Museum.