Dimitar Dobrovich

Picture a young man from Sliven, an Ottoman town in what is now Bulgaria, shouldering a musket in Giuseppe Garibaldi's volunteer force during the Italian revolutions of 1848. That was Dimitar Dobrovich, and for about three months he fought under the Italian nationalist's flag before going back to his easel.

He had left home early. Orphaned at 11, he made his way to Istanbul, then to Athens, where he enrolled in the newly opened Royal School of Art under King Otto, the Bavarian prince installed on the Greek throne. From there he went to Rome and studied at the academy under Tommaso Minardi, a leading painter of the day. That training made him the first academically schooled Bulgarian painter, working in a late Romantic manner at a time when his homeland had almost no tradition of easel painting of its own.

Dobrovich spent most of his long life in Italy and only came home in 1893, when Bulgaria was at last an autonomous principality freed from Ottoman rule. That July he opened a solo exhibition in the building of the National Assembly in Sofia. He settled back in Sliven, the town he was born in, and died there in 1905, nearly 90 years old.