Portrait of an old woman with dog

Anton Chladek was one of the first professional portrait painters working in Bucharest, a man of Czech background who had trained in Milan and Vienna before settling in Wallachia in the 1830s. He painted the local boyar families in the tidy, sober Biedermeier style then fashionable across central Europe, and he ran a small drawing school. Around the time this portrait was made, at the end of the 1840s, one of the boys learning in his workshop was the teenage Nicolae Grigorescu, who would grow into Romania's most famous painter. A quiet study of an old woman with her dog is exactly the kind of steady, observant likeness Chladek made his living on.