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The Art of Mihály Munkácsy and László Paál

In one of the rooms presenting 19th-century painting, visitors can acquaint themselves with outstanding creations by Mihály Munkácsy and László Paál. The showing alongside each other of works by the two artists is justified by their cooperation together on certain commissions, by their friendship with one another, and by the common features their works display. After studies in Vienna and in Germany, each spent a substantial portion of his life either in Paris or in nearby Barbizon. Accordingly, their paintings constitute an element not only of Hungarian national art, but also of the Romantic-Realist tradition in world art. Mihály Munkácsy achieved his first great success in 1870, when he won a gold medal at the renowned Paris Salon. From that moment on, his career as a painter soared ever upwards, to the unprecedented international success of ‘Milton’, which was painted in 1878, and to ‘Christ before Pilate’, which was exhibited in 1881. As the pictures on display reveal, Munkácsy was a highly versatile painter. It was from experiences during his childhood and youth that he drew the themes of his early genre pictures, e.g. ‘Apprentice Yawning’ and ‘Linen-Shredders’. Later on, when working on various commissions, he was able to demonstrate his talent in every classical painting genre. He painted historical subjects (‘Milton’), religious compositions (‘Christ before Pilate’, ‘Golgotha’, ‘Ecce Homo’), folk genre pictures (‘Tramps at Night’, ‘School at Colpach’), salon pictures (‘Paris Interior’), portraits (‘Baroness de Marches’, ‘László Paál’, ‘Portrait of Ferenc Liszt’), and, last but not least, landscapes (‘Dusty Road II’, ‘Cattle Grazing’). However, with regard to landscapes the real master was László Paál. This young painter, who grew up among the endless forests of hilly Transylvania, had a single aim in view: to render in his work the deep, almost religious rapture provoked in him just as much by the hills of Hungary as by the Dutch flatlands or by the Forest of Fontainebleau. His landscape paintings, which are personal and universal at the same time, are among the best of the later works from the Barbizon school. The most important creations of Paál’s short career as a painter (‘Landscape with Cattle’, ‘The Depths of the Forest’, ‘Swamp with Frogs’) hang on the walls of the exhibition room alongside Munkácsy’s more philosophical landscapes, as memorable examples of Romanticism charged with drama.