Portrait of a little girl

Nicolae Grigorescu learned to paint as a boy by making icons and church murals, before a scholarship carried him to Paris in the 1860s. There he drifted away from the academy and out to the village of Barbizon, near the forest of Fontainebleau, where Millet and Corot were painting ordinary country people close up and outdoors. Grigorescu brought that habit home. Back in Romania he became one of the founders of the country's modern painting, and spent much of his life on peasants, oxcarts on dusty roads, and children like this girl, giving a village child the same steady attention a studio would give a countess. The year this small portrait was made isn't recorded. It hangs today in the National Museum of Art of Romania, in Bucharest.