Portrait of the Grand Ban Năsturel Herescu

This is an unusual job for Nicolae Grigorescu. In 1870, fresh from years among the modern painters of Barbizon, he was commissioned by the board that ran Bucharest's civil hospitals to paint the great ban Năsturel Herescu, a high-ranking boyar who had lived and died in the previous century. Grigorescu never saw the man, so he had to build the portrait from older likenesses, dressing him in the heavy robes and rank of an 18th-century Wallachian nobleman. He finished it in May of that year, and it won him a gold medal at the exhibition of living artists in Bucharest. A ban was one of the highest titles a boyar could hold, roughly a provincial governor. The portrait remains in the National Museum of Art of Romania.