Ivan Angelov
1864–1924 · Bulgarian · Realism
The story
Ivan Angelov spent his working life painting people bent over in the heat of the harvest. Born in 1864, he trained at the Royal Academy in Munich, one of the great art schools of the German-speaking world, graduating in 1886, and then returned to a Bulgaria only a few years out of Ottoman rule and still overwhelmingly a country of farmers.
That world became his subject. His theme was the wheat field, the mowers, the women raking hay, the slow exhausting work of the land, and he built these scenes with a careful, classical order that lends the labour a quiet dignity. His large harvest compositions, among them the field scenes he set in the Chepino valley of the Rhodope mountains, are some of the most recognisable images in early Bulgarian painting.
From 1900 he taught at the state drawing school in Sofia, later the National Academy of Art, and rose to professor of painting there. Bulgaria sent his canvases abroad to stand for the young nation, to London, Venice, Rome and Vienna, and it was still doing so at the international shows two years after his death in 1924.
