Portrait of Petar Beron

Pavlovich painted this in 1886, when the man in it had been dead for 15 years. What kept Petar Beron's face in circulation, and eventually put it on Bulgarian banknotes, was a small book from 1824: the first modern schoolbook written for Bulgarian children, a pocket encyclopedia of language, arithmetic and natural history. A plate of a whale and a dolphin at the back, creatures readers took for fish, gave it its lasting nickname, the Fish Primer. By 1886 Bulgaria was a young self-governing state only a few years out of Ottoman rule, finally building the kind of schools that book had imagined. Pavlovich, near the end of his own life, painted Beron as the scholar he was, a doctor who had practiced medicine in Bucharest, written natural philosophy in Paris, and spoke nine languages.