Tents at sunset

In 1869 Nicolae Grigorescu was living the life of a Barbizon painter, out in the forest villages south of Paris where artists like Millet and Corot had taught a whole generation to paint the plain countryside in the open air. That year he sent work to the Paris Salon, among it a scene of a Roma encampment. This is that world: low tents pitched in the open, figures and animals settling as the sun drops and the light goes warm and level across the ground. Grigorescu had grown up poor near Bucharest, painting church icons to survive, and he carried that unglamorous eye into France. He kept returning to the roadside camps and working people of his own country for the rest of his life. This canvas hangs in the national museum in Bucharest.