Nikola Petrov

Nikola Petrov did something no Bulgarian painter had really done before: he treated Sofia itself as a subject worth painting. In the years after 1900, while the city was still turning from an Ottoman town into a European capital, he worked in its streets and squares and painted the St. Sofia Church, the Lion's Bridge, the National Theatre, the wet cobbles and grey skies of ordinary days.

He was born in Vidin, on the Danube, in 1881, and in 1903 joined the Society of Modern Art, a young circle in Sofia pushing Impressionism and Symbolism into a country that had barely seen them. His landscapes, in town and out in the countryside, carry that soft post-Impressionist light.

He had very little time. Tuberculosis caught up with him during the First World War, and he died in Sofia in 1916, only 35, leaving a small body of work and the name that has stayed attached to him, the painter of Sofia.