A Florentine

The woman in this portrait is a Florentine, and Velichkov painted her in Florence, where he was living in 1888. He had come to the city in his early thirties to learn to paint, already known back home in Bulgaria for work of a very different kind. Florence was the place to do it, a city whose galleries had trained painters for centuries, and he set himself the plainest of exercises, a single model sitting for her portrait. His years with a brush were short. Other duties would soon call him back to a Bulgaria only a decade out of Ottoman rule, and painting became one part of a crowded life. This canvas belongs to that brief Italian window, made by a man who had crossed most of a continent to sit in a Florentine studio and work.