Self-portrait

He painted this in 1921, when the face he was recording belonged to one of the elders of Bulgarian art. Anton Mitov was 59. He had already led the Sofia drawing academy through the Balkan wars and the First World War, and would return to run it a second time three years later. The country he had spent his life helping to give an art of its own had just come out of that war on the losing side, its borders cut back under the treaty signed at Neuilly. Mitov had made his name looking outward, at the streets and markets of Plovdiv and Sofia, at women in regional dress, at some of the first seascapes a Bulgarian had painted. A self-portrait turns that habit of close observation around onto the observer himself. He was also a working teacher of art history and perspective and a sharp art critic, a man whose job was judging how things were made, now setting down his own likeness. He lived another nine years after fixing his face at this age, dying in 1930.