Portrait of Mrs. Fălcoianu

"Portrait of Mrs. Fălcoianu" from 1870 places Aman in the tradition of formal female portraiture that constituted a significant part of any nineteenth-century academic painter's practice. The Fălcoianu family was connected to Romanian aristocracy and political life, and a commission from this circle would have been prestigious. Aman's female portraits from the 1860s–1870s reflect his Beaux-Arts training in the handling of fashionable dress, jewelry, and the careful management of likeness—all the conventions that distinguished the successful society portrait from the amateur attempt. Now at the Theodor Aman Museum, the painting belongs to the social portrait gallery that records the faces of Bucharest's educated elite in the critical decades of Romanian state formation. Aman was not only a history painter and nationalist; he was also the portraitist of his class and era.

Society portraiture of this period demanded precise rendering of fabric textures, lace, jewelry, and fashionable hairstyles alongside convincing facial likeness. Aman's academic technique provides the tools for all of this, though his best portraits show him subordinating material description to psychological characterization.