Portrait of Tudor Vladimirescu.

"Portrait of Tudor Vladimirescu" from 1874 depicts the Romanian revolutionary leader (c. 1780–1821) who led the 1821 Wallachian uprising against Ottoman-backed Phanariot Greek rule and became a foundational hero of Romanian national consciousness. Vladimirescu was executed before Romanian national art institutions existed, so all portraits of him are retrospective—interpretations based on descriptions and the painter's historical imagination rather than direct observation. Aman, as Romania's leading academic painter and a passionate nationalist, was precisely the person to undertake such a commission. His portrait of Vladimirescu participates in the broader nineteenth-century project of furnishing the new Romanian nation with images of its heroes—a visual mythology to accompany the written histories. Now at the Theodor Aman Museum, the work is both a portrait and a monument.

Historical portrait reconstruction required Aman to synthesize period dress, weapon types, and physical type from historical sources while producing a psychologically convincing likeness of a man no living person had seen. The result is necessarily part document, part artistic interpretation.