Grigorescu is a painter of the skies, an art he learned from Eugène Boudin; he was fascinated studying the movement of Normandy’s and Brittany’s skies with their low skyline and immense dome with puffy white clouds, similar to a painted canvas.
This work was likely created en plein air. The sky and the atmospheric air dominate the scene, taking up a significant part of the painting area. Most of Grigorescu’s landscapes at the crossroads between the 19th and the 20th centuries or early 20th century are either summer-like images, invaded by the sun, or autumnal ones, emanating light. This time the artist records a particular time in the weather, which provides him a new pictorial motif. Here, the sky around the storm is a palette of greys of various intensities, pierced by sunlight, filtered by the clouds. The steam released by the warm earth and the white cloud blurs cover the part on the left, leaving the bluish mountains uncovered in the area on the right side. What the painter usually noted in his landscapes, the irregular skyline, distinguishing for the hill area, is now broken into successive planes which seem to advance towards us, with the clouds. Underneath everything happening on the celestial vault, life on earth seems to follow its normal course, the cart with oxen, the peasant at the draw well. The work could be entitled Heaven and Earth.
Orig.: Collection of Dr Iosif N. Dona’s collection; Elena Dona’s collection.
