The Forest Ranger’s Daughter counts among Tonitza’s most popular paintings. It was done sometime between 1924 and1926, a time when the artist was sympathetically exploring the universe of children, projecting onto them his own feelings. Like most of his portraits this one too seems intent on decoding the sitter’s gaze. Though turned toward the painter, the girl is deeply engrossed in a world of her own, as if looking into herself, in a contemplative, melancholic mood. Her inner world is hardly accessible to anyone but herself.

Far from any photographic rendition, the girl’s portrait plays the card of a stark contrast between the red dress and the green foliage surrounding her, the oak leaves interspersed here and there with touches of blue and orange. Two leaves descend on the collar of the dress and draw our attention to Tonitza’s masterly passage from the foreground to the background while breaking the decorative rhythm of the foliage.

The painting was executed in Paris, where Rosenthal joined the exiled Romanian revolutionaries, following the toppling down of the Wallachian uprising by Ottoman troups. It is an allegorical representation of the social and national ideals many European intellectuals held for their respective peoples and countries. The painting shows Maria Rosetti turned to her left, dagger in one hand, Romanian flag in the other.

Wife of C. A. Rosetti, whom Rosenthal had befriended during their study years in Vienna, Mary, née Grant, was of a romantic, southern disposition despite her Scottish origin. She played an essential role in setting the Romanian revolutionaries free following their inprisonment abord an Ottoman ship on the Danube. Her dedication and energy were an inspiration and turned her into a symbol of the revolutionary uprising in Wallachia. Little wonder that the Budapest-born Rosenthal made her into his muse.

The painting shows her dressed in the Romanian folk costume she disguised herself in while following the ship on which the Romanians were held hostage. The pathos of her posture is inspired by various romantic compositions Rosenthal was familiar with.

We can catch a glimpse of Maria Rosetti’s face in a small medalion in the middle of a still-life by Rosenthal. Could it be that the painter’s admiration for her was deeper that he could have openly admitted?

Flowers by the Window was painted sometime between 1924 and 1926, soon after Pallady had moved to 12, Place Dauphine. The square, where Brâncuşi had also lived for a while, was a highly reputable address in central Paris.

The studio window frames a still-life consisting of a flower pot and a newspaper, which take up the foreground. As we gaze into the distance, we see the banks of the Seine, the left side of the river and the city rooftops. The painting’s metaphor reveals itself in the contrast between foreground and background, between the inside and the outside. For Pallady, the cozyness of his little studio and the colours of the flower pot are more than enough on a rainy, monotonous day.

From the late 19th c. until 1939, Pallady lived and work most of the time in Paris. During his study years in the studio of Gustave Moreau he had befriended Henry Matisse. This friendship also resulted in Matisse’s famous painting “The Romanian Blouse” at the Museum of Modern Art (Centre Pompidou) in Paris.

From 1926 until 1928 Dimitrie Paciurea was apparently haunted by various unsettling images. This is when most of the Chimeras were produced, their individual titles hinting to mixed mythologies that blend in the ancient with the artist’s deeply personal fears and anguish.

Of the ancient imagery associated with chimeras, the Chimera of the earth retains the lion paws and the coiled snake’s tail, the goat head being replaced with that of a woman. The monstruous hybrid creature seems to borrow from Greek mythology as well as from Romanian folklore. The muscular neck and the short, stout body, its belly lying flat on the ground, suggest a beast incapable to break away from it. The skillful, soft modelling and perfect finish of the bronze are among the most important lessons Paciurea passed on to his students at the Bucharest School of Fine Arts.

Such technical qualities continue to be the trademark of Paciurea, a sculptor whose subject matter was often associated to symbolism, while overall visual effects are reminiscent of expressionism.

Maxy’s Electric Madonna is in fact a portrait of Florentina Ciricleanu, a young actress who, by the mid-1920s, used to attend avant-garde events organised by the Contimporanul magazine. This was most probably how she met artists such as Maxy, Miliţa Pătraşcu, Petre Iorgulescu Yor and Corneliu Michăilescu, for whom she sat as a model during the following decade. The painting is dated 1926, the year Florentina Ciricleanu played in a production staged by the National Theatre in Bucharest.

The picture is nothing short of a genuine geometrical puzzle. An electric colour range sets the painting along some of Maxy’s avant-garde paintings of the 1920s. One of the best known such portrait is that of Tristan Tzara, founding father of the Dada movement. Though to various degrees, both portraits reveal Maxy’s indebtedness to Cubism.

In 1901, one year after Georges de Feure published in Le Figaro Illustré , a series of four illustrations of the seasons, Luchian was commissioned to decorate the Bucharest home of Victor Antonescu. The artist borrowed freely from de Feure’s allegories. He also established his reputation as a promoter of Art Nouveau, a style whose freshness swept across Europe. Luchian’s four decorative panels of the seasons show how quick local artists and high society were to adopt Western trends and consummer behaviours. Allegorical images of the seasons had been available in Bucharest as of about 1895, when colour lithographs and posters were sold together with various fashionable magazines.

Art Nouveau artists often resorted to allegories of the seasons as ameans to portray some of the ‘iconic’ beauties of the day. To answer his client’s aspirations, Luchian chose fashionable attitudes and poses which lent his compositions a chic urban flavour. However, his personal artistic choice soon moved in another direction, as he developed a personal style based primarily on the power of colour. It was this masterful use of colour that turned Luchian into a model for many painters of the new generation.

Iser’s Tatar family depicts an episode in the life of a Tatar family from Dobrugea, a population whose picturesqueness fascinated Romanian inter-war painters.

The scene takes place in a Muslim graveyard, amidst geometrical stones and pillars; the roof tiles of a little mosque and the white minaret are partly covered by lush vegetation. All characters wear the traditional loose baggy trousers (called șalvar). Harsh angular faces and the veils in which women are wrapped make it difficult to guess their age. Totally self-contained, dignified and statue-like, these ageless people seem to come from times immemorial.

Iser focuses on the characters’ silent grief. He looks at them with sympathy, his exploration respectful of their mourning. This is a meditation on human condition devoid of ethnic tinges.

His handling of the brush and the fairly compact, well-defined volumes are indicative of Iser’s disciplined study of Cézanne’s technique.

The Spy is one of Nicolae Grigorescu’s mature works. Although a studio piece, the painting relies on the observation and notes takes by the artist when he accompanied Romanian troupes during 1877-1878 War of Independence (the Russian-Turkish War) as a correspondent. At the time Grigorescu made hundreds of drawings which were later used for oil sketches and the few definitive works he was officially commissioned.

The breath-taking confrontation between a Turkish spy and a Romanian soldier takes place in a flat, dimly lit landscape. It has neither the solemnity of academic painting nor the triumphalism of classical military painting.

The soldiers chase one another followed from a distance by a third Romanian soldier. The spy fired his pistol, leaving a smoky white trail, just as the Romanian soldier in the foreground is raising his sword, the movement revealing how close they are. The sky and the earth are depicted in a range of subtly modulated greys, the horizon line dramatically lit by a couple of long, thick brushstrokes in yellowinsh white. It is this brush strokes that lend the picture plane unsuspected depth and a spectacular luminosity.

Following the principles of the Barbizon school and of Courbet or Corot, Grigorescu managed to convincingly convey the freshness of direct observation in this studio piece full of drama.

The Danaïde dates from 1908-1909, a time when Brâncuşi was eagerly trying to find his own way. The distillation of forms, typical for the Romanian artist’s modern approach, is eye-catching. The woman’s rotund face, her broad forehead, the hair dress and the slightly bent gaze will become recurrent features in other portraits made by the artist such as those of Mlle Pogany. From this perspective, the sculpture opens new paths in the artist’s oeuvre. It was probably called the Danaïde, a reference to Greek mythology, when it was submitted for an exhibition, the new title being considered more evocative that the simple “Girl’s Head” written by Brâncuşi on the back of a contemporary photograph.

The sculpture’s archaic, weathered look is endorsed by the porous, matt, rough quality of the Vratsa stone, a granular type of limestone. The sculpture marks Brâncuşi’s departure from Rodin as much as from academism, being one of the earliest modern attempts at redefining (abstract) sculpture.