Stanislav Dospevski

In the 1850s a young man from the Bulgarian mountain town of Samokov sat in the drawing halls of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, in the class of the Russian master Fyodor Bruni. He had been born Zafir Zograf, into the celebrated family of Samokov icon painters, the son of Dimitar and nephew of Zahari Zograf. He is usually called the first Bulgarian to receive a full academic training in art, and he took a new name to match his new life, Stanislav Dospevski.

He came home to a country still under Ottoman rule and earned his living from portraits, painting merchants and their families in a plain, realistic manner far from the gold-ground icons of his father's workshop. He also reworked church decoration along more modern lines.

His story ends abruptly with the Russo-Turkish War. During the fighting of 1877 and 1878, as Russian armies pushed south toward liberating Bulgaria, Dospevski was arrested by the Ottoman authorities and died in a prison in Istanbul in January 1878, months before the war that freed his country was over.