Portrait of a Girl

This is a small painting, about the size of a folded newspaper, and its subject is simply a girl, unnamed. That sounds unremarkable until you place it in 1850. In the Bulgarian lands then still under Ottoman rule, painting mostly meant the church: icons, saints, a gold ground. A plain secular portrait of an ordinary child, done from life in oil on canvas, was something almost no local painter could make. Dobrovich could, because he had trained at the academy in Rome, and here he turns that European schooling on a quiet, everyday face rather than a grand one. He kept it modest in scale, 54 by 43 centimetres, close enough that you meet the girl at eye level.