Dimitar Zograf

Zahari Zograf became the celebrated name in the family, yet the workshop that trained both brothers was run for decades by the elder of the two, Dimitar Zograf, first son of Hristo Dimitrov, the man who founded the icon-painting school of Samokov, a town in the Bulgarian mountains.

When their father died in 1819, Dimitar was barely into his twenties and already skilled enough to take over the workshop and its commissions. He raised and taught his much younger brother, standing in as a father to Zahari for years. Together the two decorated the main church of Rila Monastery, the largest in Bulgaria.

Unlike Zahari, Dimitar almost never signed his icons, so scholars identify them by their quality alone. Four of his own children became icon painters too, among them the son who trained in Russia and took the name Stanislav Dospevski. Dimitar kept working in the old religious tradition until his death in 1860, just as a new, secular kind of Bulgarian painting was beginning around him.