Peasant Woman with a Veil

After his years in France, Nicolae Grigorescu came home and found his lasting subject in the Romanian village. Again and again he painted its young women in traditional dress, the head wrapped in a thin white cloth, the marama that a woman wore over her hair. He worked these heads quickly and brightly, often outdoors, catching the sunlight on the white veil and the browned skin beneath it. They were not portraits of anyone in particular. They stood for a whole rural world he wanted to record and, quietly, to honour, at a time when Romania was building itself into a modern nation. These peasant girls became so bound up with his name that reproductions of them hung in ordinary Romanian homes for generations. The white veil is the detail that carries the light in almost all of them.