Portrait of Amalia Gavrilova

Ivan Mrkvicka is best remembered for crowded scenes of Bulgarian markets and village festivals, but in 1896 he sat a single woman, Amalia Gavrilova, for a formal portrait. The year matters. That same year the Czech-born painter helped found the drawing school in Sofia that grew into Bulgaria's national art academy. He was by then a fixture of the young capital, and a society portrait like this was part of the work, recording the faces of the people who were building the new Bulgarian middle class. He painted her in the plain, solid realism he had carried from central Europe, the manner he would soon be teaching to the country's first trained painters.