Still Life

In 1889 Bulgaria was barely ten years old as a self-governing principality, freshly out from under Ottoman rule, and Konstantin Velichkov was one of the public men helping to build it. Painting was the quieter side of his life. He is remembered mostly for watercolours of landscapes gathered on his travels, so this still life, worked in oil on a canvas about 60 centimetres tall, is a little out of character for him. It sets a modest domestic arrangement down plainly, the kind of private study a busy man makes for himself. It hangs today in the National Gallery in Sofia, among the Bulgarian painting of the 19th century.