Service to Bulgarian art

Ivan Markvitchka, who is by nationality a Tzech, came to Bulgaria as early as 1882, or shortly after the liberation of the Principality. In the course of his now already long career in his adopted country he has rendered signal service to Bulgarian art. Markvitchka was the first to organise the teaching of drawing and painting as obligatory subjects in the programme of the Bulgarian secondary schools, and to him mainly was entrusted the choice of the foreign teachers of drawing.

He was among the most prominent organisers of the art section at the National Exhibition held in 1892, as well as of the art gallery attached to the National Museum in Sofia, not to mention the part played by him in the founding of the first art society in Bulgaria and in the opening of the School of Painting. In addition to all this, he has been one of the most prolific contributors to the different art exhibitions, and the busiest artist with State and private orders.

Having begun as a mere teacher of drawing, Markvitchka has succeeded, by dint of labour and by untiring perseverance, in becoming President of the Society of Bulgarian Artists, Director of the State School of Painting, member of the Archaea logical Commission of the Ministry of Public Instruction, etc. Owing to the peculiar conditions in which art in Bulgaria was placed during the earlier years, Markvitchka has, in the course of his career, cultivated in turn nearly every variety of art. There is hardly any form of painting at which he has not tried his hand. He has laid under contribution every subject offered by Bulgarian scenery, Bulgarian life, or the revolutionary period (preliberation period and the recent Macedonian revolution). His pictures are to be found everywhere: in the royal palaces, in private houses, in the National Museum, in various churches and public offices.

Academy of Prague

Educated at the Academy of Prague, he acquired his real artistic training in Bulgaria by means of incessant work and by running through the whole scale of subjects: altars, graphical sketches of Bulgarian peasants, scenes of peasant life, illustrations of novels, decorative painting, portraiture, icons for Orthodox churches, etc.

The feeling which he puts into his pictures varies from the sentimentalism of moonlit nights to tragedy, as reflected in his Macedonian pictures. It must, however, be admitted that the talent of Markvitchka, unquestionable though it be, is not quite so manysided as his repertory, neither has it always been equal to the problems with which he had to deal. In his genre pictures the ethnographical element is always at the expense of the contents.

His icons never seem to render the typically Bulgarian religious feeling; his landscapes abound in artificial effects, his tragic pictures in rather sickly sentimentalism. Even his portraits, wherein he excels, seem to suffer from a certain unnatural elevation in the expression of the face, which has nothing in common with the real person. Absorbed as Markvitchka has been in incessant and exhaustive work during the best part of the last quarter of a century, he has not had sufficient opportunity to thoroughly perfect his technique in order to cope more successfully with the difficulties of the variety of subjects which the special conditions of artistic life in Bulgaria have hitherto forced upon him.