Jozsef Rippl-Ronai was born in Kaposvar, Hungary in 1861. He earned a diploma in pharmacology from the University of Budapest in 1881, but subsequently decided to become an artist. After preliminary training ant the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, he received a grant from the Hungarian National Council for the Fine Arts to study etching in Paris, where he arrived in March, 1887. In September of that year, he received additional funds to learn other printing techniques. Clearly the Hungarian government subsidized Rippl-Ronai as a printmaker as well as a painter, a remarkable prescient decision given the emergence of the peintre-graveur (painter-etcher) in the coming decade. The promising young artists’ international success would enhance the nation’s cultural prestige, and Paris, art capital of the world, was the logical place for him to forge a career.