The Poet Ienachita Vacarescu

Ienachita Vacarescu had been dead for decades by the time Anton Chladek painted him. Vacarescu, a Wallachian boyar who died in 1797, was one of the first modern Romanian poets and wrote the earliest grammar of the Romanian language. Chladek never met his sitter, so this is a commemorative image, a face attached to a founder of the national literature. Chladek himself is a quiet but important name. A miniaturist trained in Central Europe who settled in Bucharest, he became the first teacher of Nicolae Grigorescu, taking the boy on as an apprentice in the 1840s. Pictures like this belong to the years when Romanians were assembling a national culture and wanted portraits of the men they counted as its founders. Chladek went on working in Bucharest into old age, dying in 1882.