Aloys Zötl (4 December 1803 – 21 October 1887) was an Austrian painter and master dyer.[1]
Aloys Zötl was born in Freistadt in Upper Austria. He is notable for his painting of fantastical animals and other natural history subjects.[2] [3] Decades after his death in 1887 in Eferding, Zötl's work was re-discovered by surrealist André Breton, who recognized a surrealist aesthetic in it. Breton wrote: "…Lacking any biographical details about the artist, one can only indulge one's fantasies in imagining the reasons which might have induced this workman from Upper Austria, a dyer by profession, to undertake so zealously between 1832 and 1887 the elaboration of the most sumptuous bestiary ever seen."[4]