Portrait of Romanian poet Alecu Văcărescu

Anton Chladek was a painter of Czech background who settled in the Romanian lands and made his living from careful, sober portraits in the Biedermeier taste of the 1830s and 40s. He also taught, and one of his young pupils was Nicolae Grigorescu, who would grow into Romania's most famous painter. This portrait, dated 1850, shows the poet Alecu Vacarescu, from a well-known Wallachian family of writers. There is a catch, though. Vacarescu had died around 1799, roughly half a century before Chladek picked up the brush. So this is not a man painted from life but a memory portrait, worked up from an older likeness for a family that wanted its poet remembered. Chladek gives him the still, even lighting and plain dignity his patrons expected of an ancestor kept on the wall.