Building C, 2nd Floor - 15 September 2023 – 14 January 2024
Miklós Barabás, one of the foremost masters of nineteenth-century Hungarian fine art, died 125 years ago. To mark the anniversary, the Hungarian National Gallery is exhibiting 125 works at the exhibition titled Miklós Barabás. The Master of Drawing. Besides some well-known paintings, the works displayed are mostly drawings and watercolours hitherto not seen by the public. The exhibition encompasses the artist’s entire graphic oeuvre: his early works and Italian paintings (including the exceptional masterpiece, Sunset in Venice) as well as his watercolours from the 1840s, the peak of his career, his graphic works depicting life in the baths at the time, a series of his lithographed portraits, and some of his late works.
Miklós Barabás (1810–1898) is one of the most prominent representatives of Hungarian national painting, which emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century. His life’s work virtually encompasses the entire century but it mainly unfolded in the Pest of the Hungarian Reform Era. As a painter he became known for the thousands of portraits he made of his contemporaries, while his genre scenes also earned him huge success. His career as a graphic artist and draughtsman shows a far more diverse picture of Barabás: besides the aquarelles he painted during his travels in his youth, which are of outstanding significance even by international standards, he made drawings and watercolours in almost every genre. He also left behind a timeless legacy in the art of lithography, which was considered a new genre of printmaking in his day: the lithographs he made of his contemporaries in the 1840s and 1850s evoke the political and cultural public life of the Hungarian Reform Era in the form of a portrait gallery.
The exhibition uniquely presents the rich oeuvre of Barabás, who is known primarily as a portraitist, through graphic genres such as watercolour, drawing, and lithography.
The thematic and partly chronological chapters of the exhibition take visitors through Barabás’s oeuvre from his attempts at drawing in his childhood and youth to the watercolours of his old age. After his early years, an especially important role was played in his art by his Italian study trip of 1834–1835, during which he mastered the fresh approach and modern technique of watercolour painting, from its prominent representative, the Scottish painter William Leighton Leitch, and applied it throughout his career from this time on. By omitting black, he made airy and virtuoso Italian and Hungarian landscapes, which are also displayed at the exhibition. Works by Leitch and English watercolourists from the Collection of Prints and Drawings of the Museum of Fine Arts can also be seen, allowing a comparison between different artists using the same medium.
Miklós Barabás was a pioneer of national painting in the Reform Era. A large section is, therefore, devoted to his portraits. He used a wide range of techniques in his depictions of the most prominent figures of public life: writers, poets, artists, and politicians as well as the public’s favourite actors and musicians. One of the few portraits made at the time of the famous Hungarian poet, Sándor Petőfi, can also be seen here.
The versatility of Barabás is also manifest in his fashion drawings, press illustrations, caricatures, and group genre scenes, practically making him the father of a new genre. He composed numerous genre scenes for contemporary texts, while the opposite also happened as some of his drawings served as inspiration for poems. He did not exclusively work for the Hungarian press but also for periodicals published abroad, referred to as almanacs at the time. Besides giving accounts of the everyday life of his time, he was also the chronicler of major events, reporting on historic moments such as laying the foundation stone of the Chain Bridge, the construction of which became the main motif of his Pest cityscapes. Barabás’s vedutas of Pest are featured in a separate thematic unit together with Rudolf von Alt’s cityscapes of Pest from the Collection of Prints and Drawings of the Museum of Fine Arts, which were made in the same period, offering an excellent opportunity to compare the compositional methods used by the two artists and to browse the vedutas of Pest and Buda of the Reform Era.
Barabás would often seek relaxation in baths; he first availed himself of this form of cure in 1839, and gave an account of his experience, impressions, and the environment in a series of drawings, which are displayed at the exhibition in a separate unit. It is compelling to study the various therapies and recreation of those days from the perspective of today’s spa culture.
An interesting feature of the exhibition is that some of the drawings and watercolours can be examined in a rather large size as well as with a magnifying glass.
The exhibition mainly comprises a selection of works from the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, while works from the Budapest History Museum Kiscell – Metropolitan Gallery that had not been displayed before now can also be seen. The compositions of Austrian, German, and English artists preserved in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts provide interesting parallels with Barabás’s works, creating a new context for the graphic oeuvre of the Hungarian artist.
Curators of the exhibition: Orsolya Hessky and Luca Dsupin, art historians
This small watercolour occupies a prominent place among the works Barabás executed in Italy: it can be seen as a summary of the new aspirations that Barabás encountered and mastered during his study tour. The figure can be regarded as a self-portrait in the traditional sense: sitting on the shore in tranquil contemplation, the painter, equipped with all the tools of his trade, looks out over the eternally restless sea and the nature that surrounds him, poised to capture their fleeting impression.
Perhaps Barabás’s most attractive watercolour, made in Gräfenberg, reflects features of the landscape that we know of from contemporary articles and ultimately showcases Barabás’s brilliant execution of the watercolour technique that he had mastered during his earlier travels in Italy between 1834 and 1835. While the pine trees on the distant mountain peaks are shrouded in mist or cloud, the leafy trees, grass, flowers, and rocks in the middle ground and foreground are depicted in minute detail. The painting gives away the extent of the developments at the hydrotherapy clinic in 1839, as the central Hrad (Castle) building can be seen towering above the wooden and stone houses.
Emma Schmidt, fiancée of József Nagy Sándor, a martyr of the 1848 War of Independence, married Gábor Klauzál in 1853. Barabás wrote the following about the origins of this work: “I paid a visit to General Nagy Sándor, whom I knew from his time as a second-lieutenant in the József Hussars, and I drew his portrait. I also painted a watercolour portrait of his fiancée, the daughter of Dr Schmidt, head physician of Pest County; Nagy Sándor carried the picture with him when he was taken prisoner….”
“One day, we set off for Castellamare in a small sailing boat. When we left, the sea was so calm that the sailors had to row us; I didn’t think we’d get there before evening, although they assured us that the wind would get up by around 10 o’clock. … And indeed, just one or two minutes later the wind was whistling in my ears and the water had begun to turn choppy. Our boat was tossed about as the wind grew stronger; the waves crashed over our heads, and one wave struck the captain seated next to me with such force that he and the person opposite him almost fell out of the boat. I too was soaked to the skin by the crashing waves. … I was certain we wouldn’t escape with our lives.” (Detail from the Autobiography of Miklós Barabás)
In this tiny but fascinating drawing of Mór Than, we are given a glimpse into Miklós Barabás’s studio, which displays all the accoutrements of a professional Budapest artist. Of particular interest is the large painting on the wall of the studio, the first work by the artist displayed in Hungary after he returned from Italy in 1835; it was this painting that brought him public acclaim. “… [T]he Rape of Europa, which I copied from the painting by Paolo Veronese and subsequently sent to Vienna from Venice… so that I would not be obliged to drag it around Italy with me.”
