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Lot Essay
In the 1870s and 1880s, Mihály Munkácsy was regarded as one of the most famous and sought-after artists by collectors in Europe and North America. Born Mihály Lieb in 1844 in the small Hungarian village of Munkacs, the orphan and apprentice carpenter rose to become an internationally acclaimed painter-prince in Paris. He received his earliest artistic instruction from the itinerant painter Elek Szamossy before studying briefly in Budapest, Vienna and Munich. On the advice of Wilhelm Leibl, Munkácsy made his way to the Dusseldorf studio of Ludwig Knaus, whose humorous, anecdotal painting had a lasting impact on the young artist. His best known work from his time in Knaus’ studio, entitled The Last Day of Condemned Man, received the gold medal in the 1870 Paris Salon, and made the 26 year-old artist famous overnight.
After the Franco-Prussian War, Munkácsy established himself in Paris, where he came under the influence of the realism of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon School of painters. Like Courbet, Munkácsy painted emotionally charged pictures of the lower classes with heavily impastoed brushwork, structuring his paintings out of a dark under-painting and working tone on tone towards brighter accents of color. In 1874 he married the Baroness de Marches, the widow of the artist’s Luxembourg patron, and this brought about a striking change in all aspects of his oeuvre. Munkácsy climbed out of the despair and darkness of The Last Day of Condemned Man, and turned to a more colorful and joyful mode of painting, exchanging the wretched poverty of Hungarian village life for the elegance of the bourgeois salons of the French capital. His splendid townhouse on the Avenue de Villier, completed in 1880, was the scene of sparkling soirées attended by celebrities from the worlds of art, literature and music and was frequented by Liszt, Massenet, Paine, Dumas and Doré. In the words of an anonymous author of an 1886 exhibition catalogue, Munkácsy’s home ‘is a museum, filled up to the roof with treasures of art and rarities. One would be inclined to believe that the splendor of times long past shone around the successor of the painter-princes Raphael, Titian and Rubens, with whom he is worth in every respect. Then too, you may observe how he absorbs, with his artistic eye, color, brilliancy, light and beauty, in order to reflect them again in his art’ (fig. 1). By no means giving up his call for ‘truth to life’, Munckácsy now took inspiration from the delicately painted, fashionable interiors of Alfred Stevens and the splendid colorism of Hans Makart. The result was a very personal style that expressed above all the beauty of material things – spirited in delivery, dashing in color, illusionistic in textures and luxurious in the patina of finish.
Grandfather’s Name Day belongs to the group of paintings the artist called his ‘salon pictures’, a body of work painted between 1878 and 1887. The intimate atmospheres of these pictures, representing chic Parisiens at leisure, hint at the bourgeois ideals of domesticity, prosperity and refinement; the private space is exalted as the material foundation of the family and the supporting pillar of the social order. As in many of the paintings from this period, the composition is split in half; on one side the grandfather happily dandles the baby on his knee while his young granddaughter looks on, while on the other side, the young mother looks up from her embroidery while her maid, with hands on hips, watches in amusement. The composition is anchored at the center by a beautiful still life set upon a round, ornately draped table. The background is filled with potted plants and a sideboard decorated with objets d’art while a rich Oriental rug draws the two sides of the composition together. It is interesting to note that the work is executed on a large, single piece of mahogany panel, a testament to the wealth of the artist himself.
Munkácsy’s anecdotal, emotionally-inflected genre painting made him the darling of American collectors and his works eventually found their way into the most celebrated collections of the American Gilded Age. The artist visited the United States several times, and his arrival in New York on November 15th, 1886 for the 23rd Street Tabernacle Exhibition resembled the state visit of a monarch and was front page news. The city of New York honored him with a banquet at Delmonico’s, where the attendees included the mayor, newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911) (who was also Hungarian), and preacher Henry Ward Beecher. Later, in Washington, D.C., President Grover Cleveland held a banquet at the White House in Munkácsy’s honor.
Grandfather’s Name Day once graced the collection of Jay Gould (1836-1892), a leading American railroad developer and speculator. Considered one of the more notorious ‘robber barons’ of the Gilded Age, his success in business made him one of the richest men in America. Mr. Gould acquired the painting in 1886, the year it was painted and the same year as Munkáscy’s New York triumph.
We are grateful to Dr. Judit Boros for confirming the authenticity of this work on the basis of photographs.
After the Franco-Prussian War, Munkácsy established himself in Paris, where he came under the influence of the realism of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon School of painters. Like Courbet, Munkácsy painted emotionally charged pictures of the lower classes with heavily impastoed brushwork, structuring his paintings out of a dark under-painting and working tone on tone towards brighter accents of color. In 1874 he married the Baroness de Marches, the widow of the artist’s Luxembourg patron, and this brought about a striking change in all aspects of his oeuvre. Munkácsy climbed out of the despair and darkness of The Last Day of Condemned Man, and turned to a more colorful and joyful mode of painting, exchanging the wretched poverty of Hungarian village life for the elegance of the bourgeois salons of the French capital. His splendid townhouse on the Avenue de Villier, completed in 1880, was the scene of sparkling soirées attended by celebrities from the worlds of art, literature and music and was frequented by Liszt, Massenet, Paine, Dumas and Doré. In the words of an anonymous author of an 1886 exhibition catalogue, Munkácsy’s home ‘is a museum, filled up to the roof with treasures of art and rarities. One would be inclined to believe that the splendor of times long past shone around the successor of the painter-princes Raphael, Titian and Rubens, with whom he is worth in every respect. Then too, you may observe how he absorbs, with his artistic eye, color, brilliancy, light and beauty, in order to reflect them again in his art’ (fig. 1). By no means giving up his call for ‘truth to life’, Munckácsy now took inspiration from the delicately painted, fashionable interiors of Alfred Stevens and the splendid colorism of Hans Makart. The result was a very personal style that expressed above all the beauty of material things – spirited in delivery, dashing in color, illusionistic in textures and luxurious in the patina of finish.
Grandfather’s Name Day belongs to the group of paintings the artist called his ‘salon pictures’, a body of work painted between 1878 and 1887. The intimate atmospheres of these pictures, representing chic Parisiens at leisure, hint at the bourgeois ideals of domesticity, prosperity and refinement; the private space is exalted as the material foundation of the family and the supporting pillar of the social order. As in many of the paintings from this period, the composition is split in half; on one side the grandfather happily dandles the baby on his knee while his young granddaughter looks on, while on the other side, the young mother looks up from her embroidery while her maid, with hands on hips, watches in amusement. The composition is anchored at the center by a beautiful still life set upon a round, ornately draped table. The background is filled with potted plants and a sideboard decorated with objets d’art while a rich Oriental rug draws the two sides of the composition together. It is interesting to note that the work is executed on a large, single piece of mahogany panel, a testament to the wealth of the artist himself.
Munkácsy’s anecdotal, emotionally-inflected genre painting made him the darling of American collectors and his works eventually found their way into the most celebrated collections of the American Gilded Age. The artist visited the United States several times, and his arrival in New York on November 15th, 1886 for the 23rd Street Tabernacle Exhibition resembled the state visit of a monarch and was front page news. The city of New York honored him with a banquet at Delmonico’s, where the attendees included the mayor, newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911) (who was also Hungarian), and preacher Henry Ward Beecher. Later, in Washington, D.C., President Grover Cleveland held a banquet at the White House in Munkácsy’s honor.
Grandfather’s Name Day once graced the collection of Jay Gould (1836-1892), a leading American railroad developer and speculator. Considered one of the more notorious ‘robber barons’ of the Gilded Age, his success in business made him one of the richest men in America. Mr. Gould acquired the painting in 1886, the year it was painted and the same year as Munkáscy’s New York triumph.
We are grateful to Dr. Judit Boros for confirming the authenticity of this work on the basis of photographs.