Clearing Back 

Nicolae Grigorescu painted ‘Clearing Back’ with oil on canvas sometime in the late nineteenth century. It’s a landscape painting that could be anywhere, and perhaps that’s the point. Grigorescu studied in Paris, where he would have absorbed the aesthetics of impressionism. But he returned home to Romania at a time when his country was trying to establish a clear sense of national identity. The institutions of art played a key role in this, and Grigorescu became one of the founders of Romanian modernism. But what does it mean to paint a national landscape? Is it a political act? I think so. We can study the social history of nineteenth century Romania, to see how artists took on the task of representing its land and its people. We see how his work reflects the society of his time, and the cultural institutions that gave shape to it.