Slovak Boy Selling Onion Franz Eybl

Alongside idealisations of rural life, depictions of the hardships suffered by the peasantry enjoyed huge popularity in the nineteenth century, leading to a demand for genre paintings. Such paintings often contained some kind of moral message.
This is certainly the case with Franz Eybl’s Slovak Boy Selling Onions, a work that conveys an almost palpable sense of compassion for the marginalised peasant boy in his ragged clothes. The young boy stares straight out from the painting, while the light directed onto him makes him into a monumental figure. The artist has endeavoured to depict the boy’s clothing as accurately as possible – like other painters of the period he was fascinated by peasant dress. The rough linen garments, typically worn by poorer peasants, lend even greater emphasis to the boy’s poverty.
As a renowned lithographer and portraitist, Eybl often visited the Hungarian territories of the Habsburg Empire and presumably also drew inspiration for his genre paintings from his travels. This may well have been the case here, as the Slovaks formed a substantial minority population in the then Hungarian territories.

Bianka Izsák-Boda