A Clearing

Nicolae Grigorescu, who started out as a painter of icons, moved on from the Bucharest College to Paris for further training from 1861 to 1869. Though he did not entirely abandon patriotic historical subject matter, he was the first Romanian artist to break with academic tradition by adopting plein-air landscape styles. He made repeated visits to France, and his technique acquired an ease that places his paintings scarcely second, in the freshness of the treatment, to the early work of Pissarro and Sisley.