View over Lake Balaton Sándor Brodszky

Sándor Brodszky, an artist showered with official acknowledgement for decades, became a popular painter of Hungarian castles and landscapes after returning from Vienna and Munich. This grand-scale rendering of the unparalleled panorama of the northern shore of the Balaton was commissioned by the state to enrich the stock of the Hungarian National Museum. It was known that Brodszky had already scored successes with other views of the lake. He transferred his on-the-spot sketches to the canvas in the studio; after all, the large size of the canvas, the stormy weather and the meticulous technique would not have allowed for painting in the open. In this way, he could enhance the monumental impression by thorough deliberation, the balancing of light and dark spots, stressed and unstressed details. The medieval ruins withstanding the tribulations of centuries on top of the basalt cones rising out of the Tapolca basin could also tell tales of the one-time glory of the region. However, the painter was more interested in rendering the rich natural formations and diverse atmospheric phenomena, treating the castle ruins as organic constituents of the landscape. Just like Carl Rottmann (1797―1850), whose work he had studied earlier in Munich, Brodszky was a practitioner of late romantic landscape painting who already incorporated the effects of the real sight into his pictures. | Anna Szinyei Merse