Ion Andreescu

He had about a decade of painting before tuberculosis killed him at 32. Ion Andreescu, born in Bucharest in 1850, trained first as a drawing teacher in the Romanian provinces, then followed the example of the older Romanian master Nicolae Grigorescu and left for France.

By the late 1870s he was at Barbizon, the village south of Paris where a generation of painters had gone to work straight from the forest and fields rather than the studio. There he learned to paint outdoors in the open air, and his snow-bound view of Barbizon in winter, all bare branches and grey sky, is among the works that carried his name. In 1878 he took some classes at the Académie Julian in Paris and showed his pictures in the same rooms as Manet, Monet and Renoir.

He went home to Romania in 1881, already ill, and painted the woods and fields around Buzău in his last months. His landscapes are quiet and thickly worked, built up from dense greens and browns, many of them made in the two years before he died in 1882.