Ghergani Gypsy

"Ghergani Gypsy" from 1872 places Grigorescu among the painters who documented Romania's Roma population—a community with a complex history in the region, including a long period of enslavement that ended only in 1856, less than two decades before this painting was made. Grigorescu's treatment of Roma subjects reflects the post-emancipation moment: the Roma were legally free but socially and economically marginal, and their presence in the Romanian countryside was a constant reality that a painter of rural life could not ignore. Ghergani was a village in Wallachia, and its Roma community would have been part of the living landscape Grigorescu traversed. The painting belongs to his growing engagement with all the human types of Romanian rural society, not only the ethnic Romanian peasantry. Now at the National Museum of Art of Romania, it offers a rare pictorial record of a community that was rarely given this kind of sustained painterly attention.

Grigorescu approaches this subject with the same tonal directness he applied to all his figure painting—form built through broad value areas, face given priority attention. The relative informality of the sitter and setting likely encourages his characteristically loose handling.