Mihály Munkácsy

Galerie Sedelmeyer, Paris
Estate of Emil Kiss (bequeathed to the present owner, 1936)

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. This painting has never been removed from its original stretcher. The paint layer is quite dirty and the only small amount of restoration is to consolidate some cracking around the signature in the lower right corner. A good deal of cracking and separation has occurred which is not unstable, yet it has distorted the paint layer in a few areas. The face of the girl on the right and other parts of her apron will require some retouching. The paint of the grass and the foreground, parts of the cows and two or three other large sections in the upper left hand corner also separated while the picture was drying. The paint layer will clean very well and some academic retouching will resolve the cracking rather well. The picture does not need to be lined and despite the pressing need for retouching to a good deal of the cracking, the condition is still quite fresh.
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Mihály Munkácsy was the pre-eminent Hungarian painter of the 19^th century. Orphaned at a young age, Munkácsy was sent to live with his uncle, a retired lawyer who encouraged the boy's precocious artistic talent. At the age of 19, after learning the joiner's trade, Munkácsy moved to Pest, which at the time was a budding cultural center. He formed many friendships with other artists in the Hungarian city, and was encouraged to enroll at the Academy in Vienna to continue his training. Following Vienna, he, like many of his contemporaries, spent a brief period at the prestigious Munich Academy. After only two years, Munkácsy entered the Dusseldorf Academy where he was greatly influenced by the German painter Ludwig Knaus. From Knaus's instruction, he not only learned great draughtsmanship, structure and form, but also adopted the technique of applying a bituminized base to his canvases. Painting directly onto a base of black paint and building the composition with additional layers of color produced an extraordinary juxtaposition of dark and light tones. This dramatic technique is a true hallmark of Munkácsy's work and is evident in Woodland Interior.

 

In 1872, Munkácsy and his new wife, a recently widowed baroness, moved to Paris, where he spent the remainder of his career, becoming one of the most beloved and sought-after artists of his time. The Sedelmeyer label on the reverse of Woodland Interior refers to influential art dealer Charles Sedelmeyer, with whom Munkácsy signed a lucrative ten-year contract in 1878.  Sedelmeyer began his career a specialist in Dutch painting but eventually promoted the top artists from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Munkácsy's relationship with Sedelmeyer propelled him into a prolific period in his career - his output from the late 1870s and 1880s is today recognized as his most successful. Andras Szekely writes: "The warm greenish-brown, Barbizonian landscapes, the genre paintings of the seventies and the shining vedutas [sic] of the 1880s are real masterpieces" (Mihály Munkácsy, 1980, p. 9).