Revolutionary Romania

Constantin Daniel Rosenthal painted this the year after the 1848 revolution collapsed. He had thrown himself into that uprising alongside his friends in Bucharest, arguing for a free and united Romania, and when it failed he was scattered into exile with the rest. From there, in 1850, he imagined the nation as a young woman in the traditional dress of the Muscel region, a tricolour over her shoulder, stepping forward with a steady look. The model was a real person, Maria Rosetti, the wife of a fellow revolutionary, and Rosenthal was among the first painters to make the embroidered Romanian peasant blouse a national emblem. He would not see any of what he hoped for. The next year, in 1851, he was arrested on a secret mission into Habsburg territory and died in prison in Budapest, the city of his birth. The canvas he left is now in the National Museum of Art in Bucharest.