Flowers

A vase of cut flowers, arranged and set down to be looked at slowly. It is one of the oldest set-pieces in European painting, a discipline the Dutch had polished for three centuries, and Hen-Yosifova had learned it properly before she settled in Sofia. That matters here, because in the young Bulgaria of her day the still life was almost unknown. Painters were busy with portraits, village scenes and the nation's history, and a table of flowers asked for nothing but patient attention to petal, leaf and the light caught in glass. She kept at the subject in oil and watercolour to the end of her life. For decades afterward these quiet arrangements were nearly forgotten, until a retrospective gathered them again more than a century after she was born.