The Quay at Messembria

Around 1910 most Bulgarian painters still worked indoors, from studies and memory, and Yordan Kyuvliev was one of the first to carry his easel down to the sea and paint the coast straight from life. This is the quay at Mesembria, the old Greek-founded town on a rocky Black Sea peninsula that Bulgarians now call Nesebar. He caught it in bright, loose, open-air brushwork, the kind that gets his seascapes counted among the earliest Bulgarian painting anyone calls impressionist. It is a fairly large canvas, close to a metre across. He finished it in 1910, the same year he drowned, at the age of 33.