Nicolae Grigorescu

At 23 Nicolae Grigorescu was painting the inside of a monastery church, the walls of Agapia in the hills of Moldavia, in a careful blend of Byzantine icon tradition and a softer modern manner. That was the trade he had learned as a boy, apprenticed young to a workshop that turned out icons and church frescoes.

In 1861 a scholarship took him to France, and there everything shifted. He fell in with the painters of Barbizon, a village at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau where artists such as Jean-François Millet had left the studio to paint outdoors, straight from the fields. Grigorescu carried the habit home: peasant girls, white oxen dragging carts down dusty roads, the ordinary Romanian countryside seen in open air and daylight.

In 1877, when Romania fought for its independence from the Ottoman Empire, he went with the army to the front and sketched the soldiers at the fortifications of Grivița. He is usually called the father of modern Romanian painting, and most of his work has stayed in the country. The ox-cart on a sunlit road became almost his signature image.