Studio: international art (15.1899)

A Roumanian Painter

by his first experience of Western civilisation. him and which will delight him for the remainder
Through every pore he absorbed the Parisian of his days. The fact that his countrymen are
atmosphere of the period of the second Empire, and proud of him is the only praise in which he delights,
there by a steady course of reading he made up for Campina is situated between the Baragan—a
his hitherto neglected education. He is in every way kind of steppe near the mouth of the Danube—and
a self-educated man. Tired, at length, of street-life the greener plateaux of Transylvania. The native
and studio-work, he took up his abode either in the women and girls are clad in classical-shaped and
forest of Fontainebleau or in Normandy ; he visited bright-coloured costumes, such as red, black, and
the London International Exhibition, and England blue, embroidered with gold and silver, reminding
remains among the most agreeable of his reminis- one of Salammbo and Theodora, and the villages
cences. He paid long visits to Italy, to Greece, and are literally hidden in forests of plum-trees. The
Constantinople ; he went from France to Roumania wooden roofs of the houses are supported by grace-
and from Roumania to France as fancy led nim; ful little wooden columns, cleverly carved by the
sometimes stopping at Vienna or Berlin to study peasants, and round about them there are always to
the masters at the museums of these two cities. He be seen hay-ricks, stacks of maize, coloured gar-
now leads a solitary life at Campina, in the magnifi- ments drying on the fences, and flower-pots where-
cent valley of the Prahova, where the one object of ever there is room for them. Higher up on the
his life is to reproduce the scenery he has before slopes of the mountains are beech-woods of a

density unknown in other countries, and
with which the forests of France and
Germany cannot be compared. In the
clearings of the forest one suddenly
comes upon quaint scenes of half-naked
children rambling about, gipsy encamp-
ments with their charcoal-burners,
basket-makers, and tinkers. The only
roads are the beds of streams, or
rough footpaths deep in slush after rain,
but full of dust after two hours' sun.
Teams of oxen slowly wend their way
along these paths, taking whole families,
dressed in light-coloured embroidered
garments, to their work in the fields or
to the nearest fair. These are the scenes
that Grigoresco loves to paint, and many
are the pictures by the artist that are
to be found scattered about in the
royal and princely palaces, in the public
buildings and museums of Bucarest and
Jassy, and in the house of the English
amateur, Mr. Goodwyn, the director of
the Roumanian bank.

But, in addition, he is a portrait and
military painter. It was actually under
the besieged walls of Plevna, in the
midst of the fighting, that Grigoresco
drew and painted his most realistic pic-
tures of the violence and excesses of war.
It is necessary to see his famous paint-
ing of the storming of Smardan, at the
town hall of Bucarest, in order to realise
how the most peaceful of peasants can
be transformed by war into a fierce
' a normandy cottage " by niculae grigoresco soldier, and how a painter, as a rule so

116