Boats

By the 1920s a small town on the Black Sea coast had become the place Romanian painters went to work. Balchik sat in Southern Dobruja, territory Romania had gained a few years before, a stretch of white cliffs and fishing boats that looked more like the eastern Mediterranean than anything else in the country. Queen Marie built herself a seaside retreat there, and a colony of artists followed. Theodorescu-Sion was one of them. He had trained in Paris and moved restlessly between styles across his career, and by the time he painted this he was in his forties and drawn to plain working subjects. Boats pulled up on the shore gave him what he wanted: simple blocks of hull and sail, strong light, a few flat planes of color. He is better remembered for his scenes of Romanian peasant life, painted with the same wish to reduce a subject to its essential shapes. He died in Bucharest in 1939, a dozen years after this.