Rocks and Birch Trees

By the time Ion Andreescu painted this stretch of rocks and birch trees, landscape painting was changing under him. The interest was moving away from recording a particular place and toward the painting itself, the relationships of colour, the play of light and shadow. Reddish-brown foliage and the greys of the rock sit against a dominant blue sky, with the pale trunks of the birches rising through it, all laid down in the fresh, direct brushwork Andreescu had learned painting outdoors at Barbizon, in the forest of Fontainebleau. He had gone to France on Grigorescu's example and come back with that open-air method. Landscapes like this, made in the few years before his early death in 1882, are treated as founding works of modern Romanian landscape painting.