Constantin Daniel Rosenthal

Constantin Daniel Rosenthal made one of the defining images of the Wallachian Revolution even though he was born in Pest, in what is now Budapest. In Paris, after the uprising of 1848 had been suppressed, he painted Revolutionary Romania using Maria Rosetti as the model. She was born in Guernsey, was married to his friend C. A. Rosetti, and had helped imprisoned revolutionaries after they were taken aboard an Ottoman ship on the Danube. Rosenthal showed her in Romanian folk dress, holding a dagger and the national flag, turning a real participant in the events into an allegory of the country itself. The National Museum of Art of Romania describes Rosenthal as an artist whose work sits directly at the crossroads of art and politics. His surviving career was brief, but those revolutionary paintings became enduring images in Romanian historical culture.