Old Woman Mending

In 1867 Nicolae Grigorescu was in France, working at Barbizon on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest, where painters like Jean-Francois Millet had made the labouring poor a serious subject. Grigorescu had come to art the hard way, painting icons and monastery frescoes in Romania before he ever saw Paris. That year the French capital was crowded for its great World's Fair, but the pictures he cared about were small and plain, a single figure bent over ordinary work. An old woman mending cloth is exactly the kind of subject Millet had made respectable, given quiet dignity rather than sentiment. The dark, close tones and the humble figure belong to those Barbizon years, before Grigorescu's palette brightened on his return to the Romanian countryside.