The search is on for portraits painted by a remarkable artist and pioneering inventor who lived and worked in Lancaster more than a century ago.

Karel Klic moved to Lancaster in the 1890s and, to mark the centenary of his death next year, local arts and heritage charity, Mirador, and a group of interested parties, including retired Lancaster University senior lecturer Dr David Steel, are hoping to stage an exhibition of his work.

“To date only a small group of his portraits have been positively identified,” said Dr Steel, a Klic enthusiast, who worked in the University’s Department of Languages and Cultures – now known as the new School of Global Affairs.

A founder member of the University in 1964 and author of the book Karel Klic, Lancaster and the Democratization of Art, 1916, Dr Steel added: “We are also aware that two of Klic’s works were donated to the Accrington Mechanics Institute in 1920 by local solicitor Samuel Sandeman, one was a painting of a pet dog and the other of a coal merchant.

“The contents of the Institute were dispersed in the 1980s. If anyone has any knowledge of the fate of these two paintings we would very much appreciate hearing from them.”

Klic painted many oil paintings of prominent people in Lancaster and Accrington, among them a portrait of Sir Thomas Storey, which is displayed in the City Museum, and Accrington’s mayor, Thomas Whittaker, which is now in private hands.

“We would very much like to hear from anyone who may possess a Klic portrait or landscape, perhaps handed down from within their family, as was the Whittaker portrait,” said Dr Steel.

Klic was a classically trained artist fascinated in capturing likenesses. His work is highly regarded for its detailed brushwork and in his native land he is seen as a national hero for his artistic works and the contribution he made to the development of rotogravure printing which brought art to the masses.

However, Klic, originally from Bohemia which is now the Czech Republic, is little known in Lancaster even though he played a really significant part in the city’s industrial life in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries and lived in Meadowside, now part of Lancaster Medical Practice.

The planned exhibition will tell the story of how the artist, turned inventor, developed a process for reproducing high quality images known as rotogravure printing and came to England to further develop his invention.

He lived first in Accrington, possibly seeing the potential of using his technique in the local calico printing industry but then moved to Lancaster where he struck up a close working relationship with the Storey Brothers, renowned for producing oil cloth.

Together, they established the Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Company based in Queen’s Mill, now the site of Lancaster’s Aldi in Aldcliffe Road.

Using Klic’s rotogravure method they printed fine art images so that most households could afford, for the very first time, to have art on their walls at home.

Although the exhibition organisers have already identified source material about Klic, they would like to include many of his oil paintings from his time in England.

Klic normally signed his paintings in red, sometimes vertically on the edge of the portrait.

If you can help in the search for Klic paintings, please email Dr Steel at d.steel@lancaster.ac.uk