Self-portrait

Danchov painted this when he was 21, a young man from Chirpan who had learned his craft making church icons and lithographs. In 1867 Bulgaria was still an Ottoman province, and a secular self-portrait, a painter turning his trade on his own face, was a fairly new idea here, part of the national awakening then gathering pace. He gives himself a steady, direct look and the plain dark clothes of a serious young townsman. Within a couple of years he would be sheltering the revolutionary Vasil Levski in his house, and would later pay for his politics with a sentence of exile to the far edge of the empire. That was all ahead of him. Here he is simply a careful beginner, practicing on his own face the portrait-making that became his trade.