Adrian-Silvan Ionescu. Editing and peer review managed by:. Oprescu", Bucharest. Calin Demetrescu, Cristian Velescu. Romanian version available at:.
RIHA Journal His talent for painting shone out from an early age. The outbreak of the Russian-Ottoman War in late June saw the Romanian principalities occupied by the Russian army. In , he was appointed Court Painter and Photographer, a position he held for the rest of his life. In that capacity, he followed his patron, Prince Carol I, on the battlefield during the Russian-Romanian-Ottoman War of , which was waged south of the Danube. He toured the fairs and the crowded streets of the town in search of picturesque types.
The artist's last major work was the chromolithographic album of the themed floats which paraded the capital city at King Carol's coronation pageant, on May More recently, he has become known β and accepted β abroad due to his contribution as a pioneer of photographic art. Owing to the diversity of his preoccupations, the techniques and genres that he mastered β easel painting, portrait, landscape, compositions with multiple characters occasioned by political, military, religious or social events, lithography, photography β he stood a better chance of making himself known on the Romanian artistic scene than many other contemporary artists.
He had come from his native Transylvania to Walachia, during the fourth decade of that century, like many an itinerant miniaturist, in order to take advantage of a market greedy for portraits, a genre which had but recently been discovered and adopted by the Romanian high society, as had countless other occupations that were known in the homelands of the Austrian and especially the Russian troops. In an ample composition in the same minute style, he immortalised a ball from the reign of Bibescu, where alongside gentlemen in tailcoats and Russian officers shining in their parade uniforms, one can see numerous fashionable ladies dressed in evening gowns, adorned with lace and fabulous jewellery, as well as ladies dressed in oriental costume, wearing embroidered fezzes on their heads and short jackets with long slashed sleeves, conversing with bearded boyars of the Phanariotic period parading their fur-lined mantles worn over the long striped tunics caught at the waist by a cashmere sash.
The variety of costumes in the composition is accounted for by the fact that it was a gathering in which most of the affluent people in the Capital City participated, from merchants to grand boyars, and where everyone came wearing their Sunday best, of which oriental costumes were still much appreciated. His features, the shaven cheek, unadorned by long sideburns but only by a moustache, have nothing of the delicate, almost feminine physiognomy of the new Ruling Prince.
