Beech forest in summer

Ion Andreescu had only a few years to paint. He went to France at the end of the 1870s and settled near Barbizon, in the forest of Fontainebleau, where a generation of painters had gone to work directly from the woods and fields. His canvases hung in the same Paris exhibitions as Monet and Renoir. Forest interiors like this one were his real subject, the light filtering down through the trees, the undergrowth and the ground given as much attention as any figure would get. He was already ill with tuberculosis, and in 1881 he came home to Romania, where he died the following year at just 32. For a painter with so short a working life, the hush of a summer wood was something he came back to again and again.