Portrait of the Painter Simonidy

This is one painter looking at another. Constantin Pascali, a portraitist of Greek family who had trained in Munich and settled in Bucharest, painted his colleague Michel Simonidy in 1890. Both men belonged to the small community of Greek-descended artists then working in the Romanian capital. Simonidy was only 20 when he sat for this, and within a few years he left for Paris, studied under the celebrated portraitist Leon Bonnat, and made a name there for decorative genre scenes and nudes in the elegant Art Nouveau taste of the 1900s. So the young man in this frame is caught just before the move that shaped his life, still in Bucharest, before the Paris years that made his reputation.