Self-Portrait

By 1868 Nicolae Grigorescu had left Wallachia far behind. He was living in France, working near the village of Barbizon, where painters like Corot, Millet and Courbet had settled to paint the forest and the fields straight from life. That same year he sent a canvas, a young Roma girl, to the Paris Salon. This self-portrait comes out of that moment. He was about 30, a village-born Romanian who had painted church icons as a teenager and was now measuring himself against the leading French landscape painters of the day. The plain, direct handling here, more interested in the light on a face than in polish, is exactly what he was picking up from those Barbizon friends and would carry home to become the founder of modern Romanian painting.