Self-portrait

In the 1840s a painter in the Bulgarian lands worked mostly for the church, and he was expected to stay invisible behind the saints he painted. This small oil, about 76 by 50 centimetres, is Zahari Zograf turning that around and looking straight out at us. He trained in the icon workshops of Samokov, a mountain town of painters, and here he sits in ordinary city clothes, with nothing sacred around him. Bulgaria was still a province of the Ottoman Empire, and a Bulgarian painting his own face on canvas, for no church and no donor, was close to a brand-new idea. It is one of the works usually credited with beginning the National Revival secular portrait. He made only a handful of these easel portraits in his short life. He died of typhus in 1853, at 43, and this quiet, direct face is how most Bulgarians have pictured him ever since.