Yordan Kyuvliev

Bulgarian painting came late to the open-air landscape, and Yordan Kyuvliev was among the first to carry his easel outdoors and paint the coast straight from life. Working in the opening years of the 1900s, he brought a bright, loosely brushed feeling for light to a young national art that had mostly stayed indoors, and his seascapes count among the earliest Bulgarian work anyone calls impressionist.

He barely had a career. In 1910 he drowned at the age of 33, the same year he painted The Quay at Mesembria, a view of the old Black Sea town now called Nesebar, which hangs today in the National Gallery in Sofia.