Nikola Marinov

Nikola Marinov was born in 1879 in Targovishte, a town in north-eastern Bulgaria, at a time when the country had only just won its independence from Ottoman rule. He went abroad to train, studying at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin under the Italian painters Andrea Tavernier and Giacomo Grosso, and graduating in 1903.

Back home from 1906, he settled into the life of a teacher in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, and from 1921 to 1940 held a professorship at the National Academy of Art there, serving a spell as its head in the mid-1930s. Among his pupils were Ilia Beshkov and Ivan Nenov, who became well-known figures in Bulgarian art.

He worked most readily in watercolour, painting portraits and figure compositions, and he also decorated the walls of churches, leaving frescoes in Plovdiv, Lovech, and other Bulgarian towns. He died in Sofia in 1948.