Jaroslav Věšín

Biography

The “Manoeuvres” series was begun in 1899 and ran until the Balkan War. For Jaroslav Věšín that meant thirteen years of watching the Bulgarian army before he saw a real war.

The date of his birth is uncertain: 23 May 1860 is the more usual date, but 1859 also occurs. He was born in Vraný, in Bohemia, then part of the Austrian Empire. He attended a gymnasium in Prague, then from 1876 to 1880 the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague; by some accounts, his teacher there was Jan Swerts. Among the Czech painters said to have shaped his taste are Antonín Mánes, Quido Mánes and Josef Navrátil. In 1881 he moved to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and graduated in 1883. His teachers there were Karl von Piloty, Józef Brandt and Otto Seitz; he worked in history and genre painting. After the academy he lived and worked in Munich and in Slovakia, where he painted scenes of village life. By some accounts, he worked in Slovakia from 1884 and returned to Munich in 1890.

In 1897, at the invitation of Konstantin Velichkov, the Bulgarian minister of public education, Věšín came to Bulgaria. Until 1904 he taught at the state school of painting, now the National Academy of Art in Sofia. His pupils included Nikola Petrov, Atanas Mihov and other Bulgarian painters. In these years he painted peasant life: “Threshing near Radomir” (1897), “Ploughman” (1899), “Smugglers”, also called “Haiduks” (1899), “Threshing” (1900). A separate group of works is devoted to markets: “Horse Market in Sofia” and “In Front of a Market” (both 1899), “Returning from the Market” (1898). The main subject of this period was the life and labour of Bulgarian peasants.

From 1904 he served as a painter attached to the Ministry of War. He did not abandon village life and hunting: “Coaler”, “Lumberjacks”, “On the Game’s Track” (all 1910), “Hunter with Hounds” (1911). There was also a gallery of portraits of Bulgarian and Russian soldiers, officers and generals, among them “Russian Generals” (1907). But it was his battle paintings that made his name: “The Samara Flag” (1911) and “Bayonet Charge”, also called “At the Point of the Bayonet” (1913).

During the Balkan War of 1912–1913 he was a military painter with the rank of colonel and, it is held, the only one listed at the army’s General Headquarters as a military artist. “The Turkish Retreat at Lüleburgaz” and “Lüleburgaz–Çatalca” (both 1913) date from then. For the siege of Edirne (Adrianople) there remains a series of sketches and finished works: “Bivouac in Front of Edirne” and “Resting after 13 March 1913” (both 1913), “The Tsar Watches the Fighting”. In 1914 he completed “Wagon Train by the Ergene River”.

Věšín died suddenly in Sofia on 9 May 1915. Some pictures were left unfinished, sketched in charcoal, pencil and watercolour: “Through the Barbed Wire”, “The Assault on Fort Aivaz Baba”. Most of his paintings are kept in the National Art Gallery in Sofia. A detail of “Ploughman” appears on Bulgarian banknotes: the 500 leva of 1925 and the 250 leva of 1943. One of the streets of Sofia bears his name.