The Forester's Daughter

At the end of 1925, Tonitza and three friends in Bucharest, the painters Ștefan Dimitrescu and Francisc Șirato and the sculptor Oscar Han, formed the Group of Four. They wanted annual shows of their own, hung their own way, so that the colour of a whole room would hold together. This girl was painted in exactly those years, somewhere between 1924 and 1926, and the museum's own description of her dwells on colour. A red dress against green oak leaves and acorns, picked out here and there with small touches of blue and orange. Her eyes are the centre of the picture. They meet ours, and still the look seems turned inward. Nobody recorded who she was. There is another version of her, on cardboard, in the city's Museum of Art Collections. On this canvas, listed as part of Romania's national treasure in 2023, look for the two oak leaves drifting down onto her white collar, which pull her forward out of the decorative background.