Theodor Aman (Câmpulung, northern Wallachia 1831 – Bucharest 1891), the son of an upwardly mobile merchant, studied at St Sava’s Lyceum in Bucharest before leaving for Paris (1851) to take painting lessons. This made him, after Rome-trained Gheorghe Tattarescu (1820–1894), one of the first Romanian painters to receive professional training in the established academies. In Paris, he exhibited work at the Salon of 1853 and the World Fair of 1855.

A committed patriot, he returned to Romania, where he prospered socially. In Bucharest, he designed a house-cum-studio that was intended to become a focus for cultural life in that city. The house showcased his many artistic accomplishments (wood carving, history and genre painting, etching) as well as Romanian history and art, the entrance hall being dominated by murals on key episodes in the life of the national hero Mihai Viteazul. The studio became a fashionable gathering place for the artistically minded Bucharest bourgeoisie; social gatherings there in turn became a frequent topic of Aman’s later work.

Initially strongly inclined towards academic history and genre painting, Aman for a while was the foremost artist of the Romanian national awakening, capturing both historical and contemporary episodes and anchoring the newly-independent Principalities in a historicist, heroic iconography; many of these public-historical paintings are now in the National Art Museum of Bucharest. The exploits of the insurrectionist warlord Mihai Viteazul are a recurring theme, for which Aman was indebted to the historical work of Nicolae Bălcescu. A good many of his paintings are Orientalist, possibly inspired by a journey to Istanbul and the Crimea, but couched in the standard thematic repertoire and style of European exoticism.

A second visit to Paris (1856) had acquainted Aman with the Barbizon school, and later work shows a tendency both to outdoor settings (thematizing peasant idyll as well as bourgeois social gatherings) and to a looser brush technique analogous to budding impressionism.

Settled back in Bucharest, he founded, with Gheorghe Tattarescu, the country’s first arts academy, which he directed until his death in 1891. He was undoubtedly the most important conduit between Academic and post-Academic painting in Europe and the nascent artistic scene in the newly-independent Danubian principalities.