Nikolai Pavlovich
1835–1894 · Bulgarian · Romanticism
The story
In the 1850s the lands that would become Bulgaria were still an Ottoman province, and almost the only painting anyone saw was religious, icons and church frescoes in the tradition of masters like the icon-painter Zahari Zograf. Nikolai Pavlovich, born in the Danube town of Svishtov in 1835, went another way. With money earned illustrating school atlases, he trained in Vienna and then at the Munich academy, and came home with something his countrymen had never had, pictures of their own history.
He painted Khan Asparuh founding the first Bulgarian state and Tsar Simeon at his medieval court, and he printed them as cheap lithographs that traveled from house to house. For a people still fighting for a country, these prints worked as a shared memory handed out from door to door. Pavlovich stayed close to the writers and agitators of the national revival, giving their cause faces and scenes.
He spent his last decades quietly, teaching drawing at a boys' high school in Sofia until his death in 1894. From 1951 to 1995 the national art academy carried his name.
