Austrian painter, Aloys Zötl was born on April 13, 1803 in Freistadt and lived in Eferding, in a relatively well-to-do artisanal environment. Encouraged by his father, a master dyer, he took his first steps into the world of art as a self-taught artist, and from the very beginning, he started working on sketches and watercolours depicting real or fantastic animals.

Although he never travelled, he developed a genuine concern for scientific truth and a naturalistic rigour through books. In the absence of any other biographical details, Zötl devoted himself from 1831 to 1887 to the study of the living world by undertaking a bestiary consisting of 320 large watercolours. While none of his contemporaries seemed to pay attention to it, h...