River wash

In 1867 Paris threw a vast Universal Exposition, and Nicolae Grigorescu, a young Romanian who had been living and painting in the Barbizon woods, sent seven pictures to it. This is the world he was working in then. He had left behind the church icons he painted as a boy to earn a living and had learned, alongside French painters in the forest, to work outdoors from ordinary life. A riverbank with women at their washing was exactly the kind of unremarkable rural moment that generation wanted to catch, light on moving water, figures bent to plain work, no story being told. He would carry this way of seeing back to Romania, where he became the country's most loved painter. The quick, loose brushwork is what plein-air painting looked like, colour laid down fast before the light on the river shifted.