Dr Josip Kovačić was born on the 9^th July 1935 in Čakovec, Croatia. His father was also Josip Kovačić from Prelog, and his mother was Matilda Ščavničar from Štrigova. He graduated from secondary school in Varaždin and, in 1954, he enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy, Zagreb University (French and Croatian). He graduated in 1959, and worked as a teacher of Croatian language at the teachers' training college in Čakovec. He got his Master's degree in 1973 with the dissertation "Oral folk ballads in the regions where Hungarian and Croatian or Serbian languages are spoken", and he received his PhD degree in 1980 with the thesis "The Poetics of the Ballad and the Romance Based on the Croatian or Serbian and Hungarian Materials".

He worked as a teacher at the Fourth Secondary School in Zagreb until 1980, when he retired.

This scant biography conceals a personality of many talents and skills. Only a few know that Josip Kovačić has also graduated from a secondary music school (piano) and a secondary ballet school. He has written poetry in the Parnassian spirit, gone folk dancing and, as a secondary school teacher, coached recitation groups and directed dramas. He is an excellent connoisseur of Greek mythology and world literature, as well as of classical music. His inclination for all art disciplines and his deep love of the artistic are parallel with his scholarly trait which he displayed in the very process of collecting and in consistently being true to the theme of the collected items. All these features have justly earned him the name of the "Croatian Goethe" and have made him an outstanding personality among the Croatian collectors.

In the broadest sense, his collecting interest is aimed at items which should be saved from negligence, oblivion and indolence. "Sparkles of human creativity" and self evident beauty lurk from these items, and these are reasons enough to select and preserve them. The collections of such items become an incentive for further research; conditions in which they were created, biographies of their authors, the origin of the works of art, the history of their ownership – all these become the object of study. Dr Kovačić displays his scholarly trait by permanently collecting and studying all available data about the personalities, the social environment and the works of the artist: never has an opus been completely studied. Dr Kovačić has been studying for years – in the Archives for Fine arts of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, in the National and University Library, and in the archives and libraries of our museums: he also attaches importance to the information acquired during the many conversations with people who have ever, or in any possible way, been in contact with the person or the work of art that is the object of his interest. He records all the data with an amazing meticulousness, and his precise notes, weaving incredible stories about people and places and their destinies, could be considered as an important part of "non-material" heritage. In this relationship and during his long practice, Kovačić anticipates a much more open approach to the concept of the heritage itself by identifying the importance of the museum documentation as an unavoidable corporative segment of the museum item.

The wide professional public knows Dr Kovačić as the only collector of paintings by Croatian women painters. Kovačić is primarily a collector, primevally dedicated to rescuing the cultural heritage from negligence, oblivion and indolence. This urge to rescue is explained by Kovačić himself as a trauma from his childhood, when, in 1945, devotional pillars were destroyed to obliterate borders between parcels in the process of land nationalisation. Such destruction also destroyed the memory of the idyllic moments of his childhood. To preserve an object means also to preserve the memory – this is Kovačić's guiding principle, and this is also the basic principle of museology. Museums are the places where memories are preserved, museums are the places of the beautiful, museums are the places of the order.

The beginnings of his activities as collector, which has lasted for almost fifty years. go back to his boyhood days in the countryside around Štrigova, Čakovec and Međimurje. In those days he collected various rejected objects: tombstones from St Michael's cemetery in Čakovec, ruined pieces of old furniture, objects of everyday use, photographs, old books. This local cultural and historic material has been offered to his native town, to the Museum of Međimurje in Čakovec as the most logical place to preserve and display such objects. On that occasion, Josip Kovačić sold 150 museum items and bequeathed about 50. The museum organised an exhibition of the most valuable items from the Kovačić collection, the first exhibition in a series of almost fifty exhibitions from the collection so far. The majority of the collection consists of quality period furniture, mostly restored; it predominantly originates from the Međimurje region, and some items were manufactured in the joiner's workshop of the Count Festetić, the last owner of the Čakovec castle. There is also a valuable collection of glass and ceramic tableware from the 19th century Croatian glass factories – Osredek, Zvečevo and Ivanovo polje, together with the silver, tin and brass tableware, as well as stone and wood sculptures, and some objects form the Orient. Today they represent the most valuable holdings of the museum, and most of them are on permanent display. Their value lies not in their individual market price but rather in the significance these objects have within the social context in order to preserve the memories of people, environment and time. In the sixties, after moving to Zagreb, Kovačić continued collecting by focussing on the unknown works of fringe masters. "The spirit of an epoch is not built on great masters alone who succeed in condensing the ideas of others, but rather on the hosts of "humble" masters (7), is the basic principle of Kovačić's collecting philosophy. From about a hundred "forgotten" painters whose works comprise the Kovačić collection consisting of some 4000 items (the number exceeding even the collections of some museums!), the greatest part are works by women painters.

His bequest "Croatian women painters born in the 19^th century" is exceptionally well conceived, and, together with the numerous complementary documentation material, photographs, diaries, notes and personal objects, meets all the criteria of a modern museum collection.