Portrait of a Woman with a Dog

When Theodor Aman painted this society portrait in 1862, Romania still had no art academy of its own. Aman had trained in Paris and come home as one of the very few Romanian painters with a full European education, and he made his living painting the country's growing middle and upper class. Two years later, in 1864, he persuaded the new Romanian state to found a School of Fine Arts in Bucharest and became its first director, building the institution that would train the next generation of painters. A portrait of a well-dressed woman with her lapdog is exactly the kind of commission that supported him in those years. He is generally counted as the founder of modern Romanian painting, and he stayed at the head of the school until his death in 1891.