The Gadulka Player

The instrument in this picture is a gadulka, a small pear-shaped fiddle held upright on the knee and played with a bow, strung with extra strings beneath the melody ones that ring on their own. For centuries it kept the time for village dances across Bulgaria. Milev painted it in the mid-1920s, when a generation of Bulgarian artists worn down by war and defeat turned away from the Western capitals and went looking for a national art at home, in folk dress, embroidery and song. This player belongs to that search. Milev gives the musician the flat, patterned, gold-touched manner he took from old Orthodox icons, so an ordinary folk fiddler is set down with the gravity a painter would normally save for a saint.