Worried Mother

Anxious, inward, sorrowful women run right through Marinov's work. He liked to catch a figure lost in her own thoughts rather than posed for the viewer. Worried Mother is one of these, and it dates from 1948, the final year of his life. He painted it in a Bulgaria only recently turned into a communist People's Republic, a country still unsettled after the war, when an ordinary family had a great deal to be anxious about. Near 70 and at the end of a long working life in the capital, he stayed with the register he trusted best, a woman alone with a weight on her mind.