Peasants

In the spring of 1907 the Romanian countryside rose in revolt. Peasants across Moldavia and then Wallachia, crushed by rents and the terms on which they worked other people's land, attacked estates until the army put the rising down with thousands of deaths. Apcar Baltazar painted this large composition of peasants that same year. Their heavy faces and hard, dissatisfied stares carry the mood of the moment plainly, and the picture became a reference point for later Romanian artists who wanted to show the harshness of rural life. Baltazar himself was a city man, Armenian-Romanian, a painter and critic in Bucharest who thought hard about what a modern national art should be. He would be dead within two years, in 1909, at 29.