Anton Chladek

The Wallachian boyar Ienăchiță Văcărescu, who wrote love poems and the first grammar of the Romanian language, died in 1797. The oil portrait of him in Bucharest was painted about half a century later, and the painter never saw the man. Anton Chladek worked from a fresco in the church of Sfântul Spiridon Nou, where Văcărescu stands among the donors, and turned a figure on a wall into a portrait the family could hang. He did the same for the poet's son Alecu, dead since about 1799.

Chladek was born in 1794 at Elemir in the Banat, a blacksmith's son, and was sent to Milan to learn painting. From the mid-1820s he travelled as a portraitist around Pest and Vienna, opened a drawing school in Pest, then moved to Bucharest at the end of 1835. The boyar families took to him. He had French, German and Italian, he painted in the plain Biedermeier manner they wanted, and he worked in miniature and on church walls as well.

Around 1848 a ten-year-old called Nicolae Grigorescu came into his workshop and stayed two years, painting icons. Grigorescu became the central figure of modern Romanian painting, and Romanian writers trace the light, small touch he kept all his life back to his first master's miniatures. Chladek was still painting village church murals at Baloteasca and Budești in 1856, and died in Bucharest in 1882, at 88.