Where the landscapes in Romanian museums were painted: 356 paintings on a map

#Your commune's paintings, or those of the nearest painted place

Type the name of a commune or town. If a painting names your place in its title, it appears below. Otherwise the map shows the nearest painted place, with the distance.

#Dobruja: two paintings in five

Dobruja, on both sides of today's border, holds 146 of the 356 paintings placed, or 41%, across 16 places: Balcic, Sulina, Mangalia, Tulcea, Constanța and others. One series, 33 landscapes of Sulina by Medi Wechsler Dinu, belongs to the Tulcea museum's collection. Without it, 113 remain, or 32%.

If each painting picked its place by the size of the settlement, Dobruja would hold about 1.4% (99% of simulations below 3%). If each picked at random among the 98 places, it would hold 16%. The most painted places are on the coast.

#Limits of the map

The map is not "all landscapes". Of 100,865 records, 9,393 are paintings or drawings, and for only 356 of those could the place in the title be matched with confidence. Most are called "Landscape", "Seascape" or "Winter landscape", with no place name, and cannot be put on a map.

The collection holds more than Romanian painters: there are 142 artists, including some born abroad, such as Amedeo Preziosi. 55 paintings lie outside Romania and Bulgaria, in 25 places. No collection is complete: museums sent only part of their holdings as classified.

On the map a dot sits at the place named in the title, not where the painter stood. Inside a place the dots are laid out in a spiral so each can be seen; the position among them means nothing. Only 109 of 356 have a year (89 from the date field, 20 from a "dated" note in the description).

#Method

Source: the "Clasate" collection of CIMEC (National Heritage Institute) on Europeana, 100,865 records, plus items with landscape titles from the culturalia collections. Records kept have a painting or graphic technique (oil, canvas, watercolour, tempera, pencil, engraving, drawing) and no portrait, icon or religious subject.

Place: capitalised names in the title, looked up in GeoNames (settlements) and a hand list of painted places (Balcic, Caliacra, Cavarna, Mamaia, Cișmigiu, Herăstrău). A word counts only if the title reads as a view of that place (677 matches rejected: personal names, saints, very small villages, portrait titles). A name that fits several settlements of the same rank is left out.

Year: the date field, or a date in the same sentence as "dated" or "signed"; circulation, acquisition and exhibition dates do not count. 247 paintings have no year; they show on the map as grey dots.

Checks set in advance: that Balcic has its dated paintings mostly in the 1920s and 1930s, and that Dobruja stands out against a place picked at random. The first held, with few dates; the second, against a pick by settlement size, is easy to pass and is stated with that limit. A comparison with photographs from the same collections was not made.

Control sample: 100 paintings drawn at random and read by hand, before the last clean-up of the list.