Self-portrait

Ion Andreescu painted this self-portrait in 1882, the last year of his life. He was 32 and already dying of tuberculosis, which had brought him back from France to Bucharest. Only a little earlier he had been in Paris, painting at Barbizon and showing his work in the same rooms as Manet, Monet and Renoir, largely unnoticed among them. He had come to art late, after years as a provincial drawing teacher, and had perhaps a decade of real painting in him before illness closed it off. To look at yourself steadily in paint while that clock is running is its own kind of nerve. He died that October, remembered now as one of the founders of modern Romanian painting.