In the mature stage of the work, beyond his masterful en plein air expressions, Grigorescu searched in his workshop personal solutions of intersecting the two genres, landscape and human shape, in compositions where priority is given to the human shape. The theme concerned the Impressionists, as they prioritised, in turn, just like Grigorescu, the landscape or the character.
The compositional solution chosen in our work is the vertical construction intended to emphasize the slenderness of the two female silhouettes, represented while standing. Grigorescu’s canon of feminine beauty with the vine-like idealized body of both characters (mother and daughter), has already been developed by the artist, it is his trademark. This type of silhouette will always reoccur in the artist’s work, in various syntaxes, until the end of his creation. However, the canon does not exclude in this image the presence of the realistic observation which Grigorescu does not give up, like the foot of the barefoot peasant, distorted by physical labour. The detail is a testimony to the initial study based on a drawing following a model – a peasant woman. In this sense, charcoal drawing Studies for a Girl with a Trug (MNAR, Inv. 2374) reproduced in G. Oprescu, Nicolae Grigorescu. Maturity and Final Years, seems to have been the one used by the artist for the analysed work.
Here, the artist joins the young figures dressed in the traditional costume, apart from the wooden trug (a specific element of the peasant’s household in Romania), frequent accessories in European painting with classical inserts, in the 19th century, such as ceramic pots. In the Romantic era (with veins extending after 1850), the favourite models of European artists studying in Italy or Paris – peasant women posing in Rome and Paris, coming from the province of Ciociaria, draped in their colourful, picturesque costumes – are depicted as carriers of large brass vessels or earth jars, having classical shapes1 .
Creating for a national school of painting, the Romanian version of the already existing theme – the Italian peasant in traditional costume – Grigorescu also recreated in a work similar to this one this one – the biblical theme of the young woman at the well, a subject with tradition in the history of European art. Including data from the Romanian rural world, Grigorescu re-elaborates what will be known through works with similar themes, exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1860 – 1870, or in Italy. Thus, one can evoke paintings by Camille Corot (Young Greek Woman at the Well, c. 1870), Edouard Saint (Excavations at Pompeii, 1865), Jacques Edouard Brandon (Al fontanile, c. 1863), Mariano Fortuny y Marsal, author of watercolours with a live model executed at Accademia del Nudo from via Margutta to Rome, where Grigorescu must have met him in person, in 1874. We encounter feminine types, whether or not idealised, with their vessels, throughout the course of Grigorescu’s work, from the Gipsy Woman of Ghergani, 1872 (MNAR/GARM, inv. 104155/10547), in Rodica/Spring (c. 1880; Constanța Art Museum, custody inv. 1576) until his Rodica variants towards the end of his creation.
In the catalogue of the Grigorescu exhibition opened in the rooms of the Universul periodical in 1930 (Nov., 19 to Dec.) with works that mostly belonged to the artist’s son, two paintings entitled From the fountain can be related to this one (cat. 56 – selling price 20,000 lei; cat. 78 – selling price 35,000 lei).2
Orig.: Sculptor Constantin Baraschi Collection (1957); Dr. Ovidiu Xenakis, Bucharest.
1 See Michele Santulli, Il costume ciociaro nell’arte europea del 1800, Edizioni Ciociaria Sconosciuta, Arpino, f.a.
2 Din operele Pictorului N.I.Grigorescu 1838-1907, EXHIBITION 1930/19 November – 31 December [catalogue]. Unfortunately, the catalogue summary list does not specify whether this refers to paintings or drawings.
