AVARTE 
Anca Vlad’s passion for visual arts, one that was declared from her teenage years, was without a doubt the main driver for the launch and the gradual fulfilment of her dream to set up a private art collection. The journey of aesthetic satisfaction (as well as personal sacrifice) completed by Anca Vlad to this end unfolded in parallel with that of her own profession, indeed with equal determination and energy, around an ideal of quality. Her meeting with the brilliant art critic and writer Dan Hăulică (1932 – 2014), who miraculously embodied the chance of our contemporary art in the period 1960 – 1990, was decisive both for her pending propensity for the universe of visual arts and for clarifying the idea of the transition from a collection to a museum. The procurement of contemporary art, the encounters with creators and with their workshops took place together with the procurement of modern Romanian art, based on a demanding and capable qualitative selection, on a remarkable artistic taste.
From the consistent collection of works of our masters, created since the latter half of the 19th century until the Second World War, the Grigorescu group of works comes into prominence, reconfirming the master in his capacity as national artist. At the same time, this ensemble reflects part of the situation of Grigorescu’s heritage located outside the state museums and sheds light on cases forgotten by researches (works located abroad) or on novel works. The study of the collection afforded a rediscovery of forgotten origins, which broadens the knowledge regarding the horizon of artistic taste of the elites who once possessed works by Grigorescu.
An overview of these works gives us the chance to group them into periods, enriching with comments and nuances what we already knew about Grigorescu’s work in its various stages. For this purpose, we started from the great chronological clippings made by the eminent researcher Remus Niculescu in the priceless catalogue of the 1957 retrospective. Thus, to a large extent, we can place the works from the Anca Vlad Collection not dated by the artist within the above-mentioned series1.
We considered two works to be part of the essential period of his training (1862 – 1869), spent in Paris, Barbizon and Marlotte: Reading / Leafing through the Album (reproduction in Vlahuță, 1910) and The Forester’s Daughter (probably novel), a small effigy, an expression head which could be assimilated with one of the “heads for study” displayed by Grigorescu at Bucharest in 1870 or in 1873 (possibly even later).
A second moment in Grigorescu’s creation present in the collection is the one following his return to the country, after the studies, when Grigorescu trained in the already-found theme of rural life, a dominant of Romanian civilisation. The artist’s vision partly maintains and capitalizes the stylistic hallmark, the Barbizon School type of picturality. We believe that four works belong to this series, among which In Front of the Gate, Peasant’s Household, Landscape, Nightfall.
1877, an essential time in the evolution of Grigorescu’s style – due to the limited human and artistic experience of the war, as well as due to the “obligation” of the artist to lay out with maximum speed, in sketches and painted outlines, the transient image of the frontline episode – is marked in the collection by The Sentinel, a plein air work, a novel one, to our knowledge.
From the maturity period itself, which can be placed between 1880 and 1895, several works emerge, representing the main trends of the work in this stage.
Spring in the Orchard, with the exuberance of the white strokes of the blooming trees speaks to us about Grigorescu’s great closeness (due to technique and theme) to the Impressionists, fhis former companions in the workshop of professor Charles Gleyre. Having left École des Beaux-Arts in the summer of 1863, for Fontainbleau forest, Grigorescu was part of the exodus of students of the Gleyre workshop, which also included the future Impressionists. The Romanian artist was always aware of the progress of the Impressionism movement, having direct knowledge of the paintings of his former colleagues, of the mode in which they worked and asserted themselves, and they would later inspire him on numerous occasions.
The group of works of the 1880s includes Inn at Orății (1887), a canvas which illustrates, with the mastery of expression specific to his mature style, his system of painting the same landscape motif in series, a manner of studying nature characteristic for the Impressionists.
The same period includes the two significant works, which emerged in the public conscience relatively recently, after long intervals of oblivion, From the Well and Logofătessa with the Dowry of the House. These are symbolic works of his creation, due to the national theme which the artist envisaged for his canvases, implicitly launching a Romanian school of painting, as well, and also due to the maturity of the free style, one which, however, always integrates the detail of realistic observation (From the Well, see the woman’s leg distorted by the physical labour); finally, he composed the vine-like silhouette of the young peasant woman, placed either in the landscape, or inside the country house. We believe that such iconic works, with everything that the identification of compositional framings involves, works painted on canvases bearing the stamp of the French merchants of painting items, were created in the peace of his Paris workshop, where the artist sought the solutions for the national imagery. In the century of the political and geographical moulding of Europe’s nations, the national feeling asserted itself with fertile ardour in our country, the newly-born independent state, as well as in Grigorescu’s France, a France from which Alsace and Lorraine had been amputated, one which went to great lengths to make early payments of the indemnifications for a lost war.
Logofătessa with the Dowry of the House, a work purchased from Vienna through the Dorotheum Auction House, seems to shed light on a scene in Grigorescu’s laboratory. The Logofătessa can be related to what seems to be the end of a cycle of pictorial searches, the iconic A Girl and Her Dowry (this time a horizontal composition, unlike the vertical framing of the Logofătessa).
Several compositional or simple landscapes can be grouped chronologically in the final chapter of the creation (1896 – 1907). The plein air artist has fully merged with nature. The cart with oxen, a theme that is very often encountered now, also existed in other schools of painting en plein air, particularly in the Italian one, with Guglielmo Ciardi (1842 – 1917), a contemporary of the Romanian artist. The best-known theme of Grigorescu’s works forced into oblivion the key which was, in fact, unhidden in each of these images: the refined study of light. To a great extent, the works of this final interval are part of the palette of whites, Nicolae Grigorescu’s personal solution to his plein air painting.
Due to all these reasons, let us consider Mrs Anca Vlad’s collection in the prestigious sequence of collections rigorously catalogued by Alexandru Vlahuță, at the end of his monography dedicated to the national artist in 1910.
The works were restored with erudition and care by painting restoration expert Ioan Sfrijan, Head of the Restoration Department from the National Museum of Art of Romania, an excellent connoisseur of Nicolae Grigorescu’s work.
1 Remus Niculescu, The Nicolae Grigorescu Exhibition, Catalogue, The Museum of Art of the Popular Republic of Romania, Bucharest 1957. The difficulty in placing these works along the stream of works would have been facilitated if more technical data had been supplied in the catalogues of collective and personal exhibitions (technique, size, signature, etc.). The Centennial Retrospective catalogue (1938) cannot be considered a guiding mark, either, as it contains errors.
