The Death of Lumânărică

Lumânărică, which means little candle, was a real man remembered across 19th-century Moldova: a barefoot beggar who went from church to church collecting money not for himself but to buy candles and even bells for poor parishes. The writer Costache Negruzzi fixed his memory in a well-known letter, and it was from that account that Apcar Baltazar built this large canvas in 1906. He lays the dead beggar out on a street set at a sharp diagonal, beside an open gate, the body plainly drawn and strangely at peace. Baltazar was Armenian-Romanian, a painter and sharp-eyed art critic who was already ill when he made this. He died three years later, in 1909, at 29.