Her father Heinrich von Littrow, a famous frigate captain in the Austrian Navy, cartographer, poet and playwright that worked as the head of the Trade and Nautical Academy in Trieste and as the Royal Hungarian Maritime Inspector in Fiume.
[3] After the Viennese painting lessons with Hans Canon, she received her artistic training from around 1875 under the influence of French Impressionism by the equally aristocratic Parisian painter Jean d’Alheim, a student of the romantic Alexandre Calame.
In these years Leo von Littrow developed her own individualistic, light-flooded and pure color style of impressionism.
After very successful exhibitions in Vienna (1880), Bremen (1880) London (1886), Budapest (1884), Munich (1893) or Chicago (1893, at the Woman's Building for the Colombian World Exhibition)[4] in Salzburg, and above all thanks to her large solo exhibitions in London (1899, 1904, 1906) and Vienna (1914) Leo von Littrow was the only woman to receive an honorable commission from the newly built museums of the Viennese court as early as the mid-1880s: the interior painting for the mezzanine residences of the Natural History Museum shows her painting Coast of Ragusa.
Her work was included in the 2019 exhibition City Of Women: Female artists in Vienna from 1900 to 1938 at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere.