Artist Studio in Paris

Theodor Aman painted this view of an artist's studio in Paris, the city where he spent his formative years and mixed with the Romanian exiles of the 1848 generation, young men dreaming of a modern nation. A studio picture like this works as a quiet self-portrait, the easel and props and framed pictures standing in for the man and his ambitions. And Aman was ambitious for more than himself. He wanted Romania to have the settled European art life he had tasted in Paris, so in 1864 he founded the National School of Fine Arts in Bucharest and became its first director. The grand studio-house he later built for himself there still stands today as a museum.