The Return from the Market

This is Bulgaria in 1898, a young principality barely twenty years out from Ottoman rule and still living by the rhythm of its village markets. Věšín had arrived only the year before, and the ordinary business of the countryside caught his eye at once. What he paints here is not the market itself but the going-home: the loaded cart, the tired figures on the road, the day's buying and selling folded up and carried off. He treats it as work rather than picturesque local colour. In the same handful of years he painted the horse market in Sofia and the threshing near Radomir, the same rural round caught at a different hour of the day.