Portrait of Ivana Nenova

This portrait was painted in 1875, three years before Bulgaria won its freedom, when the Bulgarian lands were still an Ottoman province. That date is the point of it. For centuries almost all painting here had been religious, icons and church walls, and a plain secular likeness of a woman named Ivana Nenova was still a new kind of picture. Hristo Tsokev, who had trained in Russia in the sober realism of the day, was among the first to record ordinary Bulgarian faces this way. He had begun, like most painters here, in the icon workshops, and he died young, in 1883, at only 36.