Self-portrait

Anton Mitov was a painter, art critic and publicist, founder of the earliest artistic guild, the Society for Support of Art in Bulgaria (1893), founder and editor of the first specialized publication on art in Bulgaria, “Iskustvo” (Art) magazine, founder of, and a professor at the National School of Drawing (the National Academy of Art) and its director from 1912 to 1918, Anton Mitov was among the ideologues and originators of Bulgarian art and culture after the Liberation. He graduated from the Florence Academy of Art in 1885. He defined himself as an artist of the “real school”, which required “that everything should be drawn from nature, not through imagination.” His oeuvre was not limited to painting. He also painted icons, worked on the decoration of the St. Alexander Nevsky Memorial Temple, and designed projects for stamps.