Head

This head dates from 1909, only a few years after the painter came home from his training in Italy. He had studied at the academy in Turin and returned to a Bulgaria that had been free of Ottoman rule for barely a generation and was still building an artistic life of its own. The head study was the staple of that academic schooling, the drill a student repeated until the modelling of a face came by instinct. He would spend the rest of his career on portraits and figure work, much of it in watercolour, and this is one of the pieces from just after he settled as a painter in Sofia.