Szinyei and hungarian impressionism

It was on this day, on 14 November, in 1840 that Claude Monet, the ‘father’ of Impressionism and its greatest master, was born. Although the lights of autumnal Budapest are different than the dawn light in the harbour of Le Havre and on the banks of the River Seine in Paris, it is worth remembering the Impressionists and Hungarian Impressionism.

It needs to be clarified at the start that Impressionism is used in more than one meaning. We can talk about Impressionism in a historical sense, which denotes the period of the emergence and spread of the trend approximately between 1870 and 1890 and includes the great era of Impressionism in European painting. Impressionism is also defined as a style: the method used by painters to capture their impression and experience of what they see. In this latter sense, impressionist pictures can be made even today, if a painter uses the method the ‘Impressionists’ did. Moreover, some compositions – quick landscape sketches, studies of clouds, sketches focusing on the characteristics of fast-changing light – can be regarded as impressionist even in the art of 19th-century academism, which of course does not mean that based on such pictures Miklós Barabás and Károly Markó could be called impressionists.

The concept of impressionism emerged in Hungarian art in the 1890s. In a certain period of their careers, József Rippl-Rónai and János Vaszary called themselves impressionists, while in his book titled Hungarian Impressionism (1914) Miklós Rózsa used the term for virtually every artist who took a fresher approach to nature than the painters of romantic academism. His list included Géza Mészöly, Mihály Munkácsy, László Paál, Simon Hollósy, Károly Ferenczy, the artists of the Nagybánya School, the artists of Szolnok, József Koszta, and of course Pál Szinyei Merse.

A question asked in Hungarian art history from time to time is whether Szinyei was an Impressionist or not? Artists and art critics largely agree that he was not. Sketches like The Swing or Clothes Drying naturally contain impressionistic elements since sketches generally tend to create an impressionist effect. However, the ethereal lightness of the sketches cannot be found in Szinyei’s large-scale, complex works such as Picnic in May and Lark. The essence of Impressionist compositions is not the inclusion of sunshine, nor the use of a light and bright palette but the presence of a certain pictorial effect. An effect that makes us feel the piece was painted in a few seconds. At the same time, one would be mistaken to think that Impressionist paintings were truly made fast, under the direct impression of what artists saw in front of themselves. On the contrary. Monet even used a great many photographs for his large compositions. The ultimate goal of Impressionists was not to be spontaneous and complete their works fast but to create the effect as if their final, large compositions had been painted spontaneously and fast. French Impressionism is also distinguished by a largely urban character. Even pictures of picnic sites along the River Seine and resorts in Normandy belong to the world of people living in cities. In contrast, in Hungarian art the impressionist approach emerged not in the depictions of towns but those of villages and the countryside. The pictures of Lajos Deák-Ébner, Béla Pállik and Adolf Fényes show the countryside mainly around Szolnok, and at times Nagybánya. Hungarian Impressionist pictures do not evoke the bustling cavalcade of railway stations, hotels, cafés and riverside walks, but the tranquillity of small farmsteads, the courtyards of peasant houses, pastures and flowery meadows.

 

14 November 2018