Nicolae Grigorescu

Landscape painted by Grigorescu (www.google.ro )

My hero is a Romanian famous painter from the 19th century, Nicolae Grigorescu. He was born on the 15th of May 1838, in a village called Pitaru, into a simple family of peasants.

Taranca (www.google.ro )

At the age of 5, his father died and his life became much harder. When he was 10 years old, Nicolae was apprenticed to a painter, and he learned the art of painting icons in his workshop. At the beginning of his work, he used to paint icons, and later he worked as mural painter for the Zamfira and Agapia monasteries. Occasionally, he used to paint portraits of the people around him, and later he got a scholarship to study in Paris. From then on, his life and career changed in a positive way, he made a lot of paintings, over 3000 works. While he was in Paris, he used to go to Louvre and paint there, admiring Gericault's, Rubens's and Rembrandt's pictures. In a short time his paintings were exhibited at the Paris Salon, at the Bucharest Exhibitions of Living Artists and the Art Exhibitions of the "Les Amis des Beaux-Arts" society. Then he went on a study tour to Italy, Vienna, Greece and Constantinople. He participated in the Independence War of 1877-1878, as a front painter, and made a lot of drawings, which inspired his later paintings. After the war, he went again to France and spent 12 years at Paris. After his coming back, he organized a lot of personal exhibitions in Romania. In 1907 he died at Campina and his house became the "Nicolae Grigorescu" Museum.

Nicolae Grigorescu was the father of the modern Romanian painting, the great master worshiped by new generations of artists, who were striving to reveal the profound richness of the Romanian soul. The Romanian people must be very proud of having such a valuable painter.