Smugglers

In the 1890s the mountains between Bulgaria and the still-Ottoman lands to the south were a smuggler's country. The border ran through high, wooded passes that no customs post could really close, and moving goods across it by night was an ordinary trade for men who knew the paths. That is the world Věšín put on this fairly small canvas in 1899. He had a taste for the harder edge of village life, the labour and the risk rather than the quaint, and a band of contrabandists on the move gave him movement, weather and danger in one scene. It belongs to the same early Bulgarian years as his market and threshing pictures, painted while he was teaching at the drawing school in Sofia.