|
Samokov school.
Art school in Samokov, near Sofia, Bulgaria, that flourished from the end of the 18th century to the end of the 19th. Initially its centre was Samokov, but some of the artists settled in other towns and villages. Samokov artists worked in painting, printmaking and wood-carving. As in other Bulgarian art schools of that time, whole families were engaged in producing certain artefacts. The best known are the painters of the Dospevski and the Obrazopisov families. Their main field of activity was church decoration and icon painting. They based their style on late medieval traditions and mainly on Creto-Athonite painting. Some of them acquired an artistic education abroad: the founder of the school, Khristo Dimitrov (c. 1745–1819), studied in Vienna at the end of the 18th century, and a half-century later his grandson Stanislav Dospevski (1823–78) studied in Moscow and in St Petersburg. While Dimitrov did not overstep the boundaries of Balkan orthodox themes and style, Dospevski worked under the influence of Russian academic painting. Some of the representatives of the school, including Zakhary Zograph, Dospevski and Nikola Obrazopisov (1828–1911), who produced portraits, landscapes and genre compositions, laid the foundations of secular art in Bulgaria. Some of the Samokov painters specialized in decorative painting. They decorated the façades and interiors of houses, churches and mosques with ornamental compositions and landscapes. Other Samokov artists produced woodcuts and intaglios with pictures of saints, religious scenes and monasteries. They were distributed as drawings and used for illustrating books printed in Samokov. Wood-carving began in Samokov after the wood-carver Atanas Teladur came from Thessaloniki and began teaching. Samokov church wood-carving is a version of the Balkan ‘Levantine Baroque’ style, which is characterized by the relatively scant attention paid to human figures. Folk motifs strongly influenced the works of some of the wood-carvers of the school. Works from the Samokov school are in the National Art Gallery, Sofia, and the museum of Stanislav Dospevski, Pazardzhik as well as in situ at the monasteries in Rila, Troyan and Preobrazhenski, near Veliko Türnovo.
|
|
There are more than 45,000 articles in The Grove Dictionary of Art.
To access the rest of this article, including the bibliography, subscribe to
www.groveart.com.
To find out more about this subject, click on a related article below and
subscribe to www.groveart.com
|
