Romanian Paintings, Orientalism and Female Portraiture in the 19th Century
Oana Nicuta
Schooled in Paris, Theodor Aman is considered as one of the first modern painters in early XIXth century Valachia and, after 1859, in modern Romania. At the same time, he is one of the artists whose orientalist paintings were rooted in the Ottoman vestiges of recent social life in late feudal Romania. For instance, the representation of women in his paintings according to such phantasmatic coordinates, although in a style imported from French painting after Romanticism, sharply contrasts with the depiction of bourgeois domestic interiors and social life to be found in French Impressionism roughly in the same period in which Aman was still producing orientalist paintings in Romania – a pictorial style he equally embraced a few years later. However, I argue that, far from being considered as simply marginal or derivative cases trapped within a self-colonizing cultural agenda, the import of what was then perceived as ‘French’, ‘advanced’ pictorial styles and its adaptation to an existing iconography of a more genuine orientalist atmosphere due to its former Ottoman cultural hegemony in the region may be rather considered a strategic political choice in his art, which was thus arguing in favour of the new social order imposed in today’s Romanian territory after 1848 and 1859.