BRODSZKY, Sándor

Hungarian painter. He studied medicine in Pest, before moving on in 1841 to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, where he studied painting under Josef Mössmer (1780-1845) and Franz Steinfeld (1787-1868). In 1845 he went to Munich, where he spent ten years, during which time he studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste under Albert Zimmermann (1808-88) and Friedrich Voltz (1817-86). His ideal landscape painter, however, was Carl Rottmann. In 1847 he exhibited his painting Solitary Mill (private collection) at the Kunstverein in Munich. He subsequently became a well-known landscape painter.

As well as many successful exhibitions in Germany, from 1842 he regularly exhibited landscapes and still-lifes in the annual exhibitions of the Artists’ Association of Pest (Pesti Muegylet) and he settled in the capital in 1856. In the same year he painted a view of the Margaret Island (Laxenburg, Royal Collection) for the Emperor Franz Joseph. In 1857 the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest bought three of his newly painted landscapes: Balaton in Storm, Ruins of Sasko and Esztergom and its Surroundings (all Budapest, Hungarian National Gallery). Brodszky’s main interest was stormy landscapes and landscapes with ruins. Sometimes he painted Hungarian landscapes with details that were more typical of the Campagna of Rome. His landscapes also included small staffage figures and popular genre scenes, often painted in a Romantic style.

After 1870 he was one of the conservative landscape painters in Hungary who preserved the traditions of the artists in Vienna and Munich during the 1840s and 1850s.

Mill

This artist belonged to the generation that followed Mark�’s, and he and his fellow artists were some of the first to return home from Munich and fulfil the public’s demand for landscapes. The enthusiasm for lithographs and engravings that had arisen in the thirties revived again in the fifties, and all the landscapes showing the Hungarian scenery are charged with renewed patriotism and love of nature. The atmosphere is therefore all the more gloomy, as the bitter memory of 1848 and the suppression that followed lent bitter sentiment to landscapes, too. In place of the heroic castles and gay vedutas, ruins, stormy forests and deserted little cottages appear in these pictures. The subject of Brodszky’s rather dry, meticulous drawing is a dilapidated, abandoned mill.

Forest Scene with River

Mill

Pond in the Alps

View to the Lake Balaton (Storm)