Self-portrait

Ion Andreescu painted this self-portrait in 1882, the last year of his life. He was 32, and he was dying of tuberculosis. Only a few years earlier he had been at Barbizon, in the forest near Paris, painting in the open air beside Grigorescu and absorbing the same landscape tradition that Corot and Millet had built there. He came home to Romania in 1881 already ill, and the illness moved fast. He looks out here directly, without flattery or drama, a working painter taking his own measure. He died that October, and this self-portrait is among the last things he painted.