Andreescu at Barbizon

By the time this was painted, the Barbizon woods south of Paris had become a kind of pilgrimage for landscape painters who wanted to work outdoors, straight from what they saw. Nicolae Grigorescu had gone there in the 1860s, and he drew a younger Romanian, the painter Ion Andreescu, out to the same forest. Here Andreescu sits among the trees in a wide-brimmed hat, sketching in the open air the way the place taught everyone to. The catalogue dates the picture to 1882. That was the year Andreescu died of tuberculosis, only 32 years old, after just a few short seasons of real work. Grigorescu shows him not posed in a studio but at ease in the landscape that shaped them both, a green tangle of leaves closing in around the seated figure.