Portrait of Mariola Dospevska

When this was painted, in 1869, there was no Bulgarian state. The land was still a province of the Ottoman Empire and had no art academy of its own. The man who made this portrait had gone abroad to learn his craft in the European academic manner, then come home to earn his living from portraits of merchants and their families, painted in plain, sober oils a world away from the gold-ground church icons his own family produced in Samokov. Here the sitter was closer still: Mariola was his wife. He gives her a dark, quiet ground and the careful modelling of a trained hand, the kind of private, secular portrait that had barely existed in this country a generation earlier. It is oil on canvas, a little under 70 centimetres tall, one of the everyday commissions that kept a painter at work in a place that had no picture galleries yet.