Hristo Tsokev

Hristo Tsokev came from Gabrovo, a crafts and trading town in the Bulgarian Balkan range, and he was the first painter from there to earn a professional art education. In the 1860s and 1870s he studied at the Moscow art school, at a moment when Russian painting was led by the Peredvizhniki, the Wanderers, a circle of realists who toured their exhibitions and painted scenes from everyday Russian life.

Tsokev brought that plain realism home. He had begun in the icon tradition, yet he is remembered mainly as a portraitist, recording the faces of Bulgarians in the last years before their country was freed from Ottoman rule. He died in 1883, only 36, soon after that liberation, and an art gallery in Gabrovo now carries his name.