Georgi Mitov

In the summer of 1900, a portrait by a young Bulgarian painter hung at the World's Fair in Paris. Georgi Mitov never saw it there. He was back in Plovdiv, bedridden with tuberculosis, and he died that August at the age of 24, only weeks after word reached him that the work had been accepted.

His had been a hard, fast life. When he was two, Ottoman troops burned his native Stara Zagora and the family fled north. He grew up poor and often sick. Talent carried him further than money should have, from early lessons with his older brother, the established painter Anton Mitov, to the Accademia Albertina in Turin, where he trained under the Italian painter Giacomo Grosso and graduated with a gold medal.

Home again in the late 1890s, he painted landscapes around the rose-growing town of Kazanlak and, in 1897, a reclining nude he called Lucrezia Romana, after the Roman noblewoman of legend, among the first Bulgarian paintings in that genre to find any audience. The portrait that finally reached Paris was of a countryman, Dragan Danailov.