This 1784 oil painting on wood, entitled The Mother of God with Christ and the Saints, is the work of Jovan Četirević Grabovan (1716-1790). Born in Grabova, in what is now Albania, Grabovan became an itinerant Orthodox painter whose career took him across a substantial part of eastern and southeastern Europe. He appears to have regarded national borders as an administrative inconvenience, although there were fortunately fewer passport queues in the eighteenth century and he didn’t have to traipse through airport security lines. Although, to be fair to him, this was a troublesome period with countries at war, so he had his own challenges.
Grabovan received artistic training in the Russian Empire, probably including time in Kyiv, before working in places now belonging to Romania, Moldova, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia. He painted for Orthodox communities across different political and cultural territories, adapting the traditional religious imagery they expected while absorbing ideas from the places through which he travelled. His work consequently combined established Byzantine forms with Russian, Ukrainian and Western Baroque influences. This was the element I particularly liked. Grabovan travelled widely, absorbed different influences and brought them together in his own work. It was difficult not to admire a man who used his journeys to combine entire artistic traditions, especially when my principal international achievement that week had been complaining about a warm glass.
The Virgin and Child dominate the central panel, surrounded by individual saints occupying their own smaller compartments. Jesus is not depicted as an ordinary, vulnerable infant, but as a remarkably composed little figure with a solemn expression, elaborate robes and his hand raised in blessing. Although it was created for Orthodox worship and devotion rather than simply as something attractive for future museum visitors to photograph, it also records the unusually mobile life of its creator. Grabovan crossed the region collecting artistic traditions, while I was collecting photographs and minor grievances about soft drinks. I liked it.