Essay

House with engraving studio

Ioana Beldiman

Text: Ioana BELDIMAN
Photos by Răzvan HATEA

A creation of the architect Alexandru Clavel (1877, Iași - 1916, Bucharest), the house of the engraver Gabriel Popescu (1866-1937), located 12 km north of Targoviste, in the commune of Vulcana-Pandelea, has been an art museum since 1972, and has the status of a historical monument1. It was built between 1902-1905 thanks to the will and involvement of the patron, who thus achieved a goal he had set himself during his Parisian studies (1894-1900). Thanks to a project of the National Museum Complex "Curtea Domnească" Targoviste and the National Heritage Institute, between 2015-2016, the house underwent major restoration and conservation work, thanks to which it has regained an identity very close to its original one2, in keeping with its status as a historical monument and with the museum mission set out in the 1969 donation to the State.

Projected against a backdrop of vegetation, next to the parents' peasant house, old trees and the stone remains of the old well, the mansion with its artist's studio - built of wood and brick (the materials of the area) on a Dobrogea limestone plinth3 - stands out to the viewer through its compact geometric volumetry and the expressive effect of the waxed oak wood color scheme4. The main facade, facing west, emphasizes the large wooden loggia above the entrance as the main piece of the whole, by bringing it forward in relation to the ground floor space that is set back. The open-work parapets in the grid give the loggia an airy presence that crowns the construction, opening, over and through the vegetation, the perspective towards the hills in front, across the road. The composition of the ensemble, with its note of elegance, undeniably bears the inspired mark of the architect Clavel, renowned at the time among architects and artists in Bucharest for his talent for designing the decorative plasticity of a building and emphasizing the warm expressiveness of the wood.

The building was erected on the land of the father's house, situated "on the bank", as Vulcana people call the place (the bank of the stream Valea Neagră), near the hill on the top of which was the Fusea Hermitage (dating from the 18th century) with the Church of the Ascension of the Virgin Mary, re-cut around 1860 by the craftsmen "Ilie and Pârvu ot Târgoviște". The priest Grigore Dumitru, the engraver's father, had served here all his life, dying on April 2, 1902. Together with his sons, he had decided on the division of the land5 which he had acquired under the Agrarian Law of 1864. For Gavrilă, the fourth child of Grigore Dumitru and Maria (daughter of the priest Vasile of Pietrari), the land on which his parents had built their own house (1873)6 and other strips of land, some with plum orchards and vineyards, in the vicinity, were provided.

The young artist, freshly returned from the French capital, crowned by the distinctions he had received for his engraving at the Paris International Exhibition of 19007, wanted to build his artistic destiny in the country, dividing his time between the capital (he was to be employed as an engraver at the Stamp Factory, then a teacher at the School of Fine Arts) and his native places, to which he was functionally attached and which fortunately had a direct rail link with Bucharest. Where he was born, he wanted to build a house where he could devote himself to engraving and live a family life centered around the Frenchwoman Marthe. Even before 1900, Gabriel Popescu8 had had the idea of proposing to Marthe Canazin, the sister of his colleague and friend from the Académie Julian, the photographer Raoul Canazin (1877-1935). The beautiful new house, the mansion at Gura Vulcănii, near the old capital of the Pays Românești, was ready to welcome the young couple when the marriage took place on September 27, 1906, in the south of France, in the town of Miradoux in the Gers department. It was in this house with its engraving studio that much of the couple's life with their children was to unfold, especially at the two chronological extremes, at the beginning (1906-1917) and at the end (1934-1937).

The artist's house

Drawing up the plans for the future building in various variants and supervising the construction site focused the young artist's will and skill, and he devoted himself to such an endeavor in parallel with the engraving and medal commissions he received, now, in the early years of the century, from Spiru Haret, the Minister of Public Instruction. To this end, he left his job as engraver at the Bucharest Stamp Factory, where he worked between April 1, 1901 and April 1, 1902, after having previously been in charge of the technical equipment of this factory with presses he had chosen in Paris, which were then bought by the Romanian state.

Concerned with the configuration of his future studio, which was to be the centerpiece of the house, generous in terms of space and light, Gabriel Popescu conceived the program for the future building at a time when in Western and Central Europe, as well as in Bucharest, the idea of an artist's studio was being discussed in artistic circles, being considered a necessary entity of modern artistic life. During his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian, Gabriel Popescu had found out - as was rumored among the student artists and reported in the newspapers - what the professor of

Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) had been preparing from 1895 onwards: the conversion of his father's house, where he had his small studio (in the Pigalle area, 14 rue de La Rochfoucauld), into a two-storey building with three spacious north-facing glassed-in studios to house the artist's paintings and the furniture he had specially designed for the exhibition and storage of his drawings. After his death, the entire building was to be given the status of an artist's house-museum in his will to the State, which is what happened in 1903, when the Gustave Moreau Museum opened its doors9.

At the end of the 19th century, other houses in which writers or artists had lived were also being prepared to be opened to the public, with a special museum status, either as a memorial house (Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris, 1902/1904) or as an artist's house, whether or not it was designed by the artist himself, with the crucible of the work, the studio, being presented/reconstituted, insofar as it had been preserved or could be reconstructed (Maison - Musée Emmanuel Lansyer, Loches, 1902; Maison - Musée Gustave Moreau, 1903, etc.a.; Rembrandt-Huis, Amsterdam, 1911).

In Bucharest, the first house designed by an artist to include a creative studio was the house of the painter Theodor Aman (1830-1890), which became a museum 18 years after the artist's death, but opened to the public in 1904, and since then has been under the care of a curator chosen by the Ministry of Education from the world of artists and writers. The house of Aman and his wife, Ana Politimos, was built in 1869 on rue Clemenței (on Ana's dowry land) according to Aman's sketches and with the contribution of the architect Fr. Scheller and the sculptor Karl Storck, with three workshops. The spacious one on the ground floor, with its windows facing the street (north), was dedicated to the realization of large-scale canvases, the display of works and the props/decor of a painter's studio (specific furniture, oriental weapons and carpets, traditional costumes, etc.); it also served as a reception room for visitors who loved painting. On the same level, a room for engravings housed the press and the necessary tools. Upstairs, above the large studio, there was a small studio, suited to the intimacy of creation, where Aman would retreat in solitude, conceiving his works. The same Minister of Education, Spiru Haret, supported by Ana Aman, succeeded in 1908 in granting the house the status of a public museum (without Aman's express wish, as far as we know).

During the years when the house at Gura Vulcănii was being built, Gabriel Popescu had before him the example of Theodor Aman's house, not so much as a museum10, but more as a maison d'artiste. He knew the place well, all the more because on February 15, 1905

the engraver was appointed custodian of the Maison Aman (following in this position the apoet Șt. O. Iosif), a post he soon left in order to take charge of the official commissioning of the engraved portrait of King Charles I. He would reunite with the Aman Museum several times during his teaching years at the School of Fine Arts, where he would for a time use the master's engraving studio to print the work of his students. Other examples of memorial houses and artists' houses (with or without workshops) that existed in the Italian world (the Museum of Gypsum and the birthplace of the sculptor Antonio Canova in Possagno, Veneto; the Buonarroti House, Florence; Raffaello's House, Urbino, etc.), in the German world (Albrecht Dürer's House, Nuremberg, 1871), etc. were often the subject of the press of the time, at least as news items11.

The Gabriel Popescu House in Gura Vulcănii is the first engraver's house in our country. The vast engraving studio upstairs was equipped with a wooden press designed by the artist after the engraving plates by Abraham Bosse (17th century). There were two large tables (one in fir, the other in oak), the plates for engraving the plates, the saddle, a ten-door cupboard on the north wall under the skylight, containing tools and containers with various substances necessary for specific operations. In 1905, when it was ready, it became one of the very few artist's studio houses in Romania, being built about four decades after Theodor Aman's (which can be visited), after Nicolae Grigorescu's house in Câmpina (not accessible, the artist being still alive)12 and after G. D. Mirea, at Șosea (c. 1900), apparently the work of the architect Ion Mincu13. It was soon followed, in 1907-1916, by the house with two workshops (separated from the actual living space) of Cecilia Cutzescu and Frederick Storck, built in Bucharest at 16 Vasile Alecsandri Street, also according to Alexandru Clavel's plans. But, by all accounts, the design of the urban house in Vasile Alecsandri Street and the historicist type of plastic decoration of the facades bore the mark of the aesthetic choices of the artist couple, quite different from what Alexandru Clavel had realized according to his taste in the countryside, in harmony with the surrounding nature and the patron.

It goes without saying that, in each of these cases, the relationship between the contribution of the commissioning artist and that of the artist-architect was configured in different proportions, the resulting work being the expression of a synthesis from two directions.

Architect Clavel

Gabriel Popescu met the architect Alexandru Clavel in Bucharest around 1900-1901, probably in the Kübler circle, the literati café (Caragiale, Al. Macedonski, Al. Bogdan-Pitești, Virgil Cioflec, Șt. O. Iosif, Al. Vlahuță, Ion Minulescu, Oscar Obedeanu, etc.) and visual artists (Ștefan Luchian, Oscar Spaethe, Dimitrie Paciurea, Nicolae Vermont, Nicolae Petrescu-Găină, etc.), in the atmosphere of the "Ileana" and "Tinerimea Artistică" societies, which brought together artists and critics who had returned from studying in Paris and Munich and whose credo was "Good artists, good comrades". These young artists, founders of societies, wanted to put their creed at the service of a modern artistic life on the Western model in a young country where everything was still to be built, including a national school of fine arts and architecture. There was a mutual trust and admiration for each other's talent and vocation, which led to recommendations for commissions, most of which, once completed, became landmarks of our modern art at the beginning of the 20th century. In this sense, the appreciative and supportive relationships between Stefan Luchian - painter, A. Clavel - architect, Oscar Spaethe - sculptor, Dimitrie Paciurea - sculptor, Virgil Cioflec - poet and art critic, were the basis for works such as: the Stolojan Chapel (Bellu Cemetery) by Clavel and Paciurea, the choice of the sculptor being due to Clavel; the bust of Luchian by Paciurea, on the recommendation of Virgil Cioflec; the cycle of the Seasons, decorative panels for the house of the jurist - liberal deputy Victor Antonescu, by Luchian, on the recommendation of Clavel and so on.

Other categories of works can also be detected, such as the portraits that the artists made of each other, in accordance with a workshop custom (Paciurea, Portrait of Luchian; Oscar Spaethe, Portrait of Luchian, Portrait of the architect Clavel14 etc.), or commissions addressed to each other, and in this category we can include the house-workshop of Gabriel Popescu, by the architect Clavel. Around 1901-1903, the two always met, and both lived in Victoriei Square, in the new building of the Palace of Public Officials, designed in neo-Romanesque style by the architects Nicolae C. Michăescu and Alexandru Clavel, the latter being at least responsible for the design of the long wooden porch marking the main façade on the top floor.

In the artistic life of Bucharest at the turn of the century, Clavel was a lively figure, original in his creativity and "incorrigible bohemian"15 temperament, inventive and full of grace, cultivated and polyglot. Recalling his encounters with Clavel, Toma T. Socolescu writes: " [...] in him there was that quelque chose d'impondérable of Alberti or, as Caragiale said of the artist I. Anestin, [it was] the nature of a true fine craftsman"16.

Clavel was the son of the French writer Auguste-Richard Clavel (b. 1847, commune of Orban, department of Tarn, France - ?). His mother, Jane Marie, née Meves17, was English. We do not know in what context, Aug.- R. Clavel settled first in Iași, where in the 1870s he taught French language and literature to the Cantacuzino and Pallady18 families, then in Bucharest, where he was to be found around 1880-1900, and then returned to France. French-language poet, journalist for

Etoile Roumaine, Auguste Clavel joined Alexandre Macedonski's Symbolist circle and coterie,19 which for a time was also frequented by the painter Ștefan Luchian ,20 who became good friends with the son of the poet, Alexandre, the architect21. The destinies of the two Romantic-structured artists remain linked by their dramatic disappearance, almost at the same time, in 1916.

Alexandru Clavel emulated the architects Ion Mincu and Giulio Magni, in whose studios he worked. He was particularly appreciated for his vocation for architectural decoration. Concerned with the adaptation of traditional elements and those of direct Byzantine origin into a national style, he embraced the lessons of Ion Mincu, a powerful and charismatic personality. It did not go unnoticed by his contemporaries that Clavel cultivated a desired resemblance to Mincu's face, in his hairstyle, moustache, beard, slim silhouette, and perhaps also in his clothing.

Alexandru Clavel arrived at these stylistic choices perhaps also in dialogue with the foreign architects working in Bucharest (Paul Gottereau, André Lecomte du Nouy), attracted by the idea of a regionalist architecture in the making, theorized and recommended by their teacher Julien Guadet, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Through Giulio Magni, he had discovered his ability to exploit the expressiveness of wood, to use this traditional material to develop decorative systems inspired by popular notches such as those of the Mogoș house in the National Art Museum22.

Together with Gabriel Popescu, they shared the ideal of the national style enthusiastically debated at the turn of the century, and implicitly aesthetic choices based on the choice of traditional materials and the sober elegance of stylized decorative detail. Having admired Clavel, Gabriel Popescu entrusted him with the design of his house in Gura Vulcănii, giving him, we believe, total freedom in his artistic conception.

The opportunity to create an architecture in a natural setting gives this freedom an exuberance present in the felicitous proportions of the main volumes, between full and empty, in the inspired design of the massive notched oak beams, which arch at the entrance to the house and support the porch, slightly curved. The elegance of the volumetric construction is underpinned by the reduction of the decorative vocabulary to its essentials, which, through the aesthetic process of sobriety, refers to Clavel's supreme work, the Stolojan Chapel (1912, Bellu Cemetery), designed with Dimitrie Paciurea, the author of the hieratic
Adormiri of the Mother of God, for which Clavel's stone architecture becomes the receptacle.

Both commander and architect belonged to the generation of those who were to build the Great Romania and their creed expressed the ideals of a historical period. Gabriel Popescu's choice of Alexandru Clavel as the architect of the house at Gura Vulcănii can be explained by such contextual arguments, as well as by the young engraver's recognition of the special artistic talent of his friend of Western descent, an original voice in the area of the search for the neo-Romanian style.

Design and realization

A page of sketches in Gabriel Popescu's sketchbook, dated around 1903-1904, preserved in the Targoviste Museum, gives in nuce the architectural idea to be realized with changes in terms of dimensions: a two-storey volume, incorporating a small porch on the ground floor, above which is a loggia of moderate dimensions23. In the plan a rectangle is attached to the south, containing the dining room, the kitchen and an exit from the kitchen to the east. A parlor, an office, and another room are indicated on the north side. The main access is on the west side, via a small porch raised a few steps above ground level. The porch leads directly from the porch into the staircase, which communicates with the parlor, study and dining room. The balanced staircase is positioned in the center of gravity of the plan, a solution abandoned in the final project. The facade in the drawing - probably seen from the south-west, as it was to be built - emphasizes the desire for neo-Romanesque architecture, which, through distillation, will be found in the final formula. The part rising on two levels comprises the staircase and the spaces of the three rooms on the ground floor, with the façade to the north, the volume to the south remaining at ground floor level. Later, the swinging staircase, with an oak structure and fir treads, will be placed as an annex on the north side.

Although the position of the workshop is not obvious in the annotated sketch, it is suspected that it was intended to be on the north side of the house, upstairs. In the end, the authors (the beneficiary and the architect), through a process of decantation, will give the workshop the position of the main part of the building, on the inside, with the loggia on the outside. A solution is adopted in which the workshop develops generously in a north-south direction in the eastern half of the building, covering more than 50 square meters (5.41 m x 10.27 m). The north-south orientation allows this space to have a large window facing north, doubled in the roof plane by a skylight. The glazed surfaces are located in different planes so that the neutral northern light required by an artist's studio penetrates as deeply as possible into the room. A second window ('usual' this time, 1.5 x 1.75 m) is cut into the south façade, with daylight controllable by curtains and drapes. The east façade remains blind. In this way a whole orchestration of light responds to the program.

Analyzing the premises that have spoken during the conception of the building, we can observe several aspects.

Gabriel Popescu's training as a draughtsman, a graduate of the School of Bridges and Roads, gave him the practice and knowledge required by the evolution of a construction site. He had worked in this capacity in 1891-1892 under the direction of Ion Mincu, on the construction site of the Central School, and had then participated in the construction of the Iași-Vaslui railway line24. Later, as a student of Beaux-Arts in Paris, he would write to his father to prepare and follow his father's instructions for brickmaking in the village of Gura Vulcănii. These were preparatory exercises to gather the building materials for his future home.

In the absence of explicit documents, an enlightening photograph taken by the architect Clavel around 1904 reveals the workings of the site and the division of tasks: in the front, at the bottom, with the plans in his hand, we can in all probability identify Rafaele Mandolini (1867-1922), probably the site contractor brought by the architect25. A member of the Italian community in Târgoviște, active here and in the area26, Mandolini was working with the architect Clavel27 at the same time, as contractor for the construction of the Post Office28. He probably chose, for the house at Gura Vulcănii, the stone for the plinth, a Dobrogean limestone much more resistant than that coming from the quarries of Muntenia. Up on the roof, among the local peasants who worked on the construction of the house is the beneficiary, who guided them closely, carrying out the tasks of a site manager at several stages. The names of these peasants are recorded by the engraver in one of his notebooks: Ilie Glodeanu, Ion Stoica Petrescu, Ilie Gaiță, Ion Voicu Dinu, Ion al lui Grigore, Vasile Voicu, Dumitru Raiu Măntescu, Raiu Măntescu, Toma Vintilescu, Niculae Ion Dumitru Vlad, Dumitrică Crăciunoiu, Niță Dumitru Vlad. They were rescued from oblivion by Elena Diaconu, the museographer of the Gabriel Popescu house-workshop29.

Later, in the summer of 1910, some additional work was carried out on the interior: the Italian mosaicist Mazzero was commissioned to install the mosaic in the kitchen area, and the carpenter Niculescu30 was called in - also on Clavel's recommendation, of course - to install some window and door frames.

In November 1907, Daniel, the couple's first child, was baptized by Clavel in the beautiful new house, which the architect had designed according to his taste and beliefs, to which the architect paid a tribute.

NOTES

1 The house became a public museum in 1972 under the title of Casa atelier engraver Gabriel Popescu, following donations to
Dâmbovița County Culture Committee, made by the family: the artist's brother's niece, lawyer Elisabeta Popescu,
donated the house in 1969, and the artist's wife and children donated drawings and engravings, archives and furniture. The museum is a section of the National Museum Complex "Curtea Domnească" Targoviste. It is a historical monument, classified DB-IV-m-A-17824.
2 Restoration project manager: engineer Petre Cercel. Restoration site managers: Eng. Petre Cercel and architect Dan Lăcătuș. The restoration was carried out with Mr. architect Corneliu Ionescu, the nephew of the donator of the house, as advisor.
3 It is assumed that the stone used for the plinth comes from a quarry in Dobrogea, information communicated (Oct. 15, 2021) with
kindly by Mr. Petre Ciurel, engineer.
4 In recent decades, prior to the restoration in 2015-2016, the loggia was painted white (oil color) which falsified the original image of the ensemble designed by Alexandru Clavel and Gabriel Popescu.
5 This will be legally accomplished through a voluntary partition act made between the five brothers (Gabriel, Haralambie,
Niculae, Ion, Mihail), on August 10, 1908, Vulcana Pandele (Ioana Beldiman Archives).
6 Today rebuilt as part of the Project and Site of Restoration of the ensemble, 2015-2016.
7 Bronze medal/honorable mention at the Paris Salon for the engraving Portrait of Martha Canazin.
8 This is how he is referred to in his papers from the period of his studies at the School of Bridges and Roads in Bucharest (1886-1888).
9 Geneviève Lacambre, Maison d'artiste, maison - musée: L'exemple de Gustave Moreau, Paris, RMN, 1997.
10 The engraver left no evidence of his desire to transform the house into a museum. In fact, from
1923, through a sale, the house no longer belonged to the engraver, but to his brother, engineer Ion Grigore Popescu, father of the donor
of the house, lawyer Elisabeta Popescu. For the history of the house after 1908, see Elena Diaconu, "Casa Atelier gravor Gabriel
Popescu, moments, 1902-2017", paper presented at the National Session of Scientific Communications, "The role
muzeelor memoriale în muzeografia române", Vălenii de Munte, 2017 (manuscript in the archive of the National Museum Complex "Curtea Domnească" Targoviste).
11 For the theme of the studio-house, see Francis Haskell, "Artisti e musei nell'Europa del secolo XIX", in Le metamorfosi del gusto, Turin, 1989, pp. 208-223; Anne Pingeot, "Les sculpteurs créent leur propre musée", in La jeunesse des musées, exhibition cat. exhibition, RMN, Paris, 1994, pp. 259-264;
12 Altered after the Second World War, N. Grigorescu's house became a public museum in 1957, through an agreement between Gheorghe N. Grigorescu, the master's son, and the Romanian state.
13 For the latter, see Petru Mortu, Anamaria Mortu, 'The History of the Mirea - Miclescu House between Stories and Documents', in the volume Architecture, Restoration, Archaeology. In honorem Monica Mărgineanu Cârstoiu, Ed. A.-R. A. , București, 2021, p. 336-380.
14 The bust of the architect Clavel, a bronze bust by Oscar Spaethe, was presented in the Exhibition of the Young Artists opened in 1907 at the Athenaeum, catalog no. 189, not reproduced. The image of the work appeared in the magazine Luceafărul, no. 16, 1907, p. 341, reprinted in Alexandru Clavel, Wikipedia, May 3, 2021. The Wikipedia page contains a
series of new biographical information, with the archive of the descendants of the architect Clavel, mentioned several times, as a source.
15 Toma T. Socolescu, Fresca of architects who worked in Romania in the modern era, 1800-1925, vol. I, typescript, 1955, p. 282, Biblioteca U.A.R.R.
16 Toma T. Socolescu, op. cit., p. 282.
17 See page Alexandru Clavel (1875-1916), Wikipedia (May 2021), accessed October 2021. It contains a number of hitherto unknown data on the architect's biography, the declared source being the Clavel family archive.
18 In Iași he was the French language and literature teacher of the future painter Theodor Pallady, see Mihai Ispir, Theodor Pallady, Ed. Meridiane, 1987, Bucharest, p. 8, 72 (note 25).
19 He published poems in French in the magazine Literatorul, contributing - Macedonski believed - to "putting Romanian literature on the world stage", see George Călinescu, Istoria literaturii române dela origini până în prezent, Fundația Regală pentru Literatură și Artă, Bucharest, 1941, p. 456.
20 Theodor Enescu, "Symbolism and Painting", in Pagini de artă modernă românească, Ed. Academiei, Bucharest, 1974, extract, p. 34.
21 See the Luchian-Clavel correspondence in Marin Mihalache, anthology and preface, Mărturii despre Luchian, Ed. Meridiane, Bucharest, 1966, pp. 22-24, 39-40.
22 This is the case of the temple of the cathedral of Calafat commented in 1908 by the chronicler Spiridon Antonescu: "As is the house of the craftsman Mogoș in the National Art Museum. Of course, national art has gained a great deal from this revival of national art in a church temple, the work of Mr. Clavel" (Spiridon Antonescu, "O tâmplă de biserică de A. Clavel", in Viața românească, an III, vol. X, nr.7/July 1908, p. 101).
23 Taking into account the freedom of the drawing, we assume that these sketches were made by Alexandru Clavel in the recipient's notebook. We do not know whether Clavel's final draft has survived.
24 Also during this period, fascinated by the personality of Ion Mincu, he was first in the entrance exam for the Architecture department of the School of Fine Arts (where Mincu was a professor), his technical training and his talent for drawing, which was noticed by the teachers of the School of Bridges and Roads, gave him all the advantages. However, he was unable to continue his architectural studies, as he had to support himself with a job that prevented him from attending regular classes.
required by regulation.
25 Daniel Popescu, the artist's son, note, 1978 (Ioana Beldiman Archive).
26 Ruxandra Nemțeanu, "Interferențe culturale. Antrepreneurs and Italian craftsmen protagonists of the neo-Romanesque style", in Revista Monumentelor Istorororice, no. 1-2/2010, p. 35.
27 A. Clavel held the position of chief architect of the Post Office, appointed in this capacity by the director general of the Post Office, arch. Grigore Cerchez. See Toma T. Socolescu, "A. Clavel. Câteva note", in Arhitectura, year IV, 1925, p. 14-15. There were probably several Italians (excellent builders and craftsmen) in the execution team of the Poșta in Targoviste, from which the architect Clavel chose the contractor and some craftsmen for the house at Gura Vulcănii.
28 Remark by Daniel Popescu in the sketchbook mentioned.
29 See Elena Diaconu, "Casa Atelier gravor Gabriel Popescu, momente, 1902-2017" (manuscript in the archives of the "Curtea Domnească" National Museum Complex, Targoviste). I would like to thank Mrs. Elena Diaconu for her generous support in gathering and verifying some of the information included in this article. See also Gabriel Popescu Archive, National Museum Complex "Curtea Domnească" Targoviste, sketchbooks.
30 Names mentioned with their respective missions by Gabriel in his letter to Marthe, September 5, 1910 (Ioana Beldiman archive).