Anica Manu with a Child

Rosenthal painted this portrait of Anica Manu, wife of a Wallachian high official, in 1848, the same year he threw himself into the revolution in Bucharest. Born in Pest to a Jewish merchant family, Constantin Daniel Rosenthal had come to Wallachia and become the artist most closely tied to the 1848 movement there. His allegory of a young woman as Revolutionary Romania is still one of the founding images of Romanian national art. Alongside that public work he kept up a steady practice of society portraits like this one, a calm domestic picture of a mother and child from the very families whose world the revolution was shaking. Within three years Rosenthal was dead, arrested by the Austrian authorities as a spy and dying in a Pest prison in 1851, at 31.