Hut

By 1873 Grigorescu had brought the lessons of Barbizon back to Romania: paint what is in front of you, outdoors, in its own light. A humble country hut was exactly the kind of subject those French painters had taught him to take seriously, the same unglamorous rural motif that Millet and Rousseau thought worth a canvas. Here the interest is not really the building but the weather and the hour, the way daylight settles on rough walls and a thatched roof. Grigorescu would spend much of his later life among scenes like this one, in the Romanian countryside he made the heart of his art.