Grape Market

When Anton Mitov painted this grape market in 1894, Bulgaria had been an independent country for barely 15 years and was still working out what its own art should look at. Mitov's answer was the street. He was drawn to open-air markets, to the noise and colour of people buying and selling, and to the heavy town costumes he knew well. Here the subject is the autumn grape trade, baskets and crowds under the open sky, worked up as a large oil. It is the kind of ordinary scene that earlier painters in these lands, trained mostly on church walls and icons, would never have thought worth a canvas.