Serbian painter, ethnographer, photographer and soldier, born in Vlasotince, southern Serbia, in 1886. He became interested in traditional culture in his early youth. He had a gift for painting and was educated in the famous school of painting of Rista Vukanovic in Belgrade and then at the Academy in Munich.
His first son Aleksandar died with the Serbian army in Albanian in 1915 , his second son Uros died in 1941 defending the city of Kragujevac. He participated himself in the First and Second Balkan war, as well as in the First and Second World war. During the Great War, he was a lieutenant in the Serbian army participating in the battles of Cer and Kolubara, the retreat of the Serbian army via Albania toward the island of Corfu.
After the First World War, Crnilovic lives in Skopje from 1918 until 1941 where he worked as an art professor in Skopje gymnasium. He has had a large influence on the first generation on Macedonian painters. At the same time, he started to build a large and very important ethological ethnic artifacts from South Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo. He also had several exhibitions in Paris in the 1920s. His painting can be found is several museums in Serbia, for example the Ethnographic Museum “Manak’s Mansion” in Belgrade.
