Anton Mitov

In 1877 Ottoman troops burned Stara Zagora, a town in central Bulgaria, and killed thousands of its people. Among the families who fled into poverty was that of a 15-year-old boy named Anton Mitov. Bulgaria won its freedom the next year, and after two years spent as a telegraph operator, saving every coin, he had enough to buy a place at the fine-arts academy in Florence.

He got there in 1881 and studied under the Italian painter Giuseppe Ciaranfi. When he came home, the country he had left as an Ottoman province was a new state building everything at once, its art included. In 1896 Mitov became one of the founders of the drawing school in Sofia that grew into Bulgaria's National Academy of Art, where he taught art history and perspective and twice served as its director.

He painted the streets and markets he knew, women in the costumes of Plovdiv and Sofia, and some of the first seascapes ever made by a Bulgarian. He was also a critic and organiser, and one of the earliest Bulgarian painters to show his work in the exhibition halls of western Europe, at a time when much of the continent still pictured his country as a cultural backwater.