Portrait of Hristiyania Zografska

The woman here is Hristiyania Zografska, the wife of the painter's older brother Dimitar, the man who raised Zahari after their parents died and taught him the craft. So this is family, painted around 1840. It is also, by most accounts, one of the earliest portraits of a woman in modern Bulgarian art. In a province of the Ottoman Empire in the 1840s, giving a woman her own painting, her face filling the canvas with nothing sacred around it, was an unusual thing for a Bulgarian to do. The oil is about 81 by 58 centimetres. Because almost nothing is written down about why he painted her, the picture has drawn a century and a half of guessing, including a romantic story about the two of them that no document supports. He painted only about four portraits on canvas in his whole life, and this is one of them.