The Inn at Orății

The Orății inn was a real place, a roadside stop on the old route between Ploiești and Brașov, up toward the mountains near Posada, where carters rested their oxen. Nicolae Grigorescu painted it more than once, beginning in the late 1870s. He shows a team of oxen inching through the midday heat past the inn while other wagons stand in the shade to the right and the hills stack up behind. By this stage of his life Grigorescu's eyesight was failing, and his colours had thinned to a pale, silvery haze that critics named his white period. That soft, dusty light was partly a painter's choice and partly the work of failing eyes. The picture belongs to the National Museum of Art of Romania in Bucharest.