Portrait of prof. Ivan Shishmanov

By 1901, when he sat for this portrait, Ivan Shishmanov was one of the busiest men in Bulgarian learning. He had helped found the University of Sofia, where he taught literary and cultural history, and for more than a decade he had edited the great national collection of folklore and ethnography, setting down in print the songs, tales and customs of the villages. There is a quiet rhyme in the commission. The painter who had made his name showing Bulgarian folk life on canvas, its markets and its dances, here portrays the scholar who was preserving that same world in words. Shishmanov looks out calm and formal, the settled face of a man at the centre of the young country's cultural institutions. Two years after this was painted he left the university to become minister of education, and the folklore collection he had run since 1889 closed its long series in 1902, the year after he sat here.