Clearing

This is late Grigorescu, painted in 1896, when he had settled at Câmpina and his palette had grown lighter and lighter. A clearing at the edge of a forest opens in whites, greys and ochre, the whole thing built to catch a soft, diffused autumn light rather than any sharp detail. Two small figures move along a path at the tree line, almost lost in the glow. By this point Grigorescu had decades behind him, the Barbizon years in France and the battlefield scenes from Romania's 1877 war, and he had arrived at this quiet, luminous landscape manner that critics later called a synthesis of the Romanian land itself. He kept painting in this vein at Câmpina until his death in 1907.