A Painter of Dreams

The painting would have been the main Hungarian attraction at the 1878 Paris Exhibition, if it had not been banned at the last minute by the French authorities. The painting's antimilitarist message was judged too provocative just a few years after the Paris Commune had been crushed.

 

The National Gallery's Zichy exhibition features more than 300 paintings, drawings, illustrations and water colours, showing the backbone of the artist's life works. Almost the entire collection of the Zichy Castle in Zala has been brought to the museum, but it is the works on loan from Russia that offer a unique chance to see creations from all of the periods in Zichy's career together. Almost a hundred of the works - all carefully selected and some restored - have been lent by the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. Zichy was recommended for a position in Saint Petersburg teaching the daughter of the prince by his teacher Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller in 1847, when he was just twenty. It was here that he created some of his greatest works.

 

After the Hungarian Revolution, Zichy returned to Hungary, where he painted the portrait of the country's first prime Minister Lajos Batthyány and worked as a retoucher. In 1852, he returned to Saint Petersburg, where he painted portraits of nobles, royal events - including the coronation and the wedding of Tsar Alexander II, city scenes, theatre plays and political caricatures, exchanging a desire to change the world for a secure income and a family life. It was during this period that the French writer and critic compared Zichy's greatness to that of Goya.

 

In 1873, Zichy moved to Paris, where, in the aftermath of the Commune, he found much greater intellectual freedom than "at home". He formed friendships with Gustave Doré, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. When The Triumph of the Genius of Destruction created a scandal instead of further cementing his reputation as an artist, Zichy rented a hall with his own money to show the picture to the public. But the critics gave a poor assessment of the picture and Zichy returned to Hungary.

 

Not long after, Zichy found himself in Saint Petersburg again, in the service of the tsar. It was during this time that he experienced one of his most fruitful periods ever, drawing illustrations for the ballads of János Arany and Imre Madách's Tragedy of Man, as well as for books by Pushkin and Milton. It is in these illustrations that we see Zichy's inner character the best.  

 

Author: Eszter Götz