King Carol I's Visit to Neamt Monastery and Fortress

Carol I was not born Romanian. He was a German prince brought in to rule the young country in 1866, and in his first years he traveled it to be seen and to learn the place he now governed. This painting records one of those journeys, to the old monastery and fortress at Neamt in the northern hills. The man who painted it, Carol Szathmari, was a Transylvanian who had become the court's image-maker, and he is remembered today above all as the founder of photography in Romania. He photographed the earlier ruler Cuza and then Carol I, and he had even hauled a camera to the front of the Crimean War in the 1850s, which puts him among the first war photographers anywhere. Here he works in oil instead, at the scale of a formal record. A surviving receipt from May 1868 shows him paid for the frames of two large landscapes of Neamt and Curtea de Arges, which is how we can date the commission so closely.