Zahari Zograf

Biography

The first icon signed by Zahari is dated 1829, when he was nineteen.

He was born on 8 October 1810 in Samokov, the son of the icon painter Hristo Dimitrov. His father died early, and his elder brother Dimitar taught the boy to paint and later worked alongside him. From 1827 Zahari was counted a spiritual pupil of Neophyte of Rila, the monk and teacher of the Bulgarian Revival. In 1831 his brother recognised him as an equal partner, that is, as a master; by other accounts, their joint work continued until about 1832, after which he worked independently. The word “zograf” means simply “painter” or “icon painter” in Greek and became his nickname. Zahari’s nephew, Dimitar’s son Zafir, is known as the painter Stanislav Dospevski.

In the 1830s Zahari painted icons for churches in the village of Katunitsa, for the churches of Saints Constantine and Helen and of Saint Petka in Plovdiv, for the Church of the Theotokos in Koprivshtitsa, and then for several monasteries. His letters to Neophyte of Rila show that in 1838 he wanted to study at the Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, and in 1841 he reported that in Plovdiv he had taken painting lessons from “two French masters”. He never got to study abroad. His murals are numerous. In 1838 he painted the holy spring chapel of the Church of the Theotokos “Ribna” in Asenovgrad, in 1839 the Belashtitsa Monastery, in 1840–1841 the churches of Saint Nicholas and of the Archangels at the Bachkovo Monastery, and in 1844 part of the main church of the Rila Monastery. His largest commission was the Troyan Monastery: invited in 1847, he painted the whole of the new Church of the Dormition of the Theotokos and the gallery in front of it. Besides the canonical ranks of saints, he painted group portraits of donors, Bulgarian and Serbian saints and, for the first time in Bulgarian painting, Russian ones: Boris and Gleb, and Dimitry of Rostov. On the vault of the gallery he painted scenes from the Apocalypse, and on the walls “The Last Judgement” and “The Wheel of Life”. Then came the painting of the church of the Transfiguration Monastery near Veliko Tarnovo.

In several cycles, by different accounts the murals of 1840, 1848 and 1849, the artist himself appears among the saints and donors. This broke with custom, and contemporaries took it in different ways. Another step towards the secular was the everyday objects in church scenes. There were few icon painters at the time who did this. The National Gallery in Sofia holds his oil portraits, an undated self-portrait and a portrait of Neophyte of Rila from 1838, as well as dozens of drawings in ink and watercolour: copies of icons, ornaments, studies of people, landscapes such as “The Bachkovo Waterfall”.

In 1841 he married Katerina Hadzhigyurova in Samokov.

In 1851–1852 Zahari spent seventeen months on Mount Athos and painted the outer narthex of the main church of the Great Lavra of Saint Athanasius. Later, in Karyes, he painted icons for the guesthouse of the Zograf Monastery. Bishop Porfiry Uspensky, who studied his work, thought that the frescoes in the Lavra “offend aesthetic taste”. Other scholars find his murals technically accomplished but superficial. I think the dispute is understandable: he knew the canon thoroughly and deliberately widened it, and strict judges did not forgive him for that. After returning to Samokov he painted a good many portraits, including portraits of patrons. After his death many sketches remained, never turned into finished works. He died on 14 June 1853 in Samokov, at the age of forty-two. His life became the basis of Pavel Spasov’s novella about the icon painter Zahari, later a play, and of Marin Goleminov’s opera “The Icon Painter Zahari”.