Slovak Cart August von Pettenkofen

During his summers in Szolnok, Pettenkofen produced many small-scale genre paintings, which he often repainted in a larger format and in greater detail on his return to Vienna. This may well have been the case with the Budapest painting Fair in Szolnok (occasionally also known as Slovak Cart), which bears the hallmarks of the placid realism typical of the Austrian painter. The painting is not dated, although we know for certain that from 1851, Pettenkofen visited Szolnok every summer to paint. This, for him, was a source of inspiration equivalent to the forest of Fontainebleau for the members of the Barbizon school: the quivering haze above the plain, colours glistening in the sunlight, models that appeared exotic to Western eyes, and the Tisza region’s wilderness of wetlands.
In the Budapest painting, the Szolnok marketplace, bathed in brilliant sunlight beneath a dazzling blue sky, is veiled in the muted tone of the Great Hungarian Plain’s swirling dust. The hayrack of the two-horse cart in the foreground has already been lowered. The third horse has presumably been attached to the cart to be sold at the market by its owner, the man in the linen shirt and straw hat driving the cart. The painting hung on the wall of Emperor Franz Joseph’s palace in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Bianka Izsák-Boda