Zograf, Zakharii

Born 1810 in Samokov; died there June 14, 1853. Painter of the Bulgarian renaissance. One of the founders of Bulgaria’s secular realistic art.

Zograf studied at the studio of his brother, Dimitr Zograf. He executed icons and church paintings with flat images colorfully based in folklore, into which he often introduced genre elements and portrait representations of contemporaries—for example the murals in the Bachkovskii Monastery, 1840, and the Ril’skii Monastery, 1844. Zograf painted the first portraits in Bulgaria—of N. Ril’skii, 1838, and a self-portrait, circa 1840 (both in the National Art Gallery, Sofia).