Iosif Bayer

Iosif Bayer wasn’t your typical 19th-century artist, he taught himself to paint while working as a railway clerk, sketching trains at dawn before his shift. His one standout quirk? He painted only portraits, but never faces you’d recognize; instead, he captured strangers he met on his travels, their names and stories lost to time.

Why he fits here: look up Gheorghe Aschi, it’s a ghostly print of a man who might’ve stepped off a Moldovan train platform in 1826, and Bayer’s hand lingers in every smudge.