A flower among the flowers

By the spring of 1870 Grigorescu had come back to Romania after his years in France, and this small panel was one of the first things the Bucharest press singled out. Critics writing in March that year treated it as a turning point, a sign that a real painter had returned. It is a modest thing, a young peasant girl set among flowers, painted on a small wooden board. What his contemporaries noticed was the freshness he had brought back from Barbizon, the soft outdoor light and the unforced pose, so different from the stiff studio portraits then usual in Bucharest. Grigorescu was 31, and he would keep painting country people this plainly and warmly for the rest of his life.