Ghergani Gypsy

By 1872 Nicolae Grigorescu had spent years in France, painting outdoors beside the artists of Barbizon in the forest near Fontainebleau. When he came home to Romania he turned that same soft, natural light on the people of its villages. This is a young Roma woman from Ghergani, an estate village north-west of Bucharest. Grigorescu paints her as a particular person rather than a costume study, in warm daylight and with the loose, quick brushwork he had brought back from France. He made many such village portraits through the 1870s, and they shaped how Romanians came to picture their own countryside. In 1899 Grigorescu became the first painter elected an honorary member of the Romanian Academy.