Hungarian painter. He learnt to paint at M. Meytens, V. Fischer and Sambach in Prague and Vienna. First he lived in Vienna and painted portraits. He moved to Pest in 1810 and painted some remarkable classicist portraits, e.g. Ferenc Kazinczy (1812) and Benedek Virág (1815). His mythological compositions (Resting Venus, Orpheus and Euridike, and Proserpina) after English copper engravings and altar-pieces were mostly inferior to his portraits.
J�nos Bihari was a a self-taught Gipsy musician in Hungary. He formed his well-known band around 1801 the Pest, poured popular and ancient Hungarian melodies into in framework of the “verbunkos”. The sources of the verbunkos, not yet comopletely known, include some of the traditions of the old Hungarian popular music, certain Levantine, Balkan and Slav elements, probably through the intermediation of the Gipsies, and also elements of the Viennese-Italian music, coming from the first cultivators of the verbunkos, the urban musicians of German culture.
Bihari left eighty-odd compositions. He was credited around 1815 with having written the R�k�czi March, which in reality had taken shape under the hands of unknown musicians from old fragments, mostly from those of the instrumental R�k�czi-tune.
Listen to the MIDI version of the R�k�czi March from Hector Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust.
D�niel Berzsenyi (1776-1836) was one of the most significant Hungarian poets of the 19th century.
J�nos Don�t was a typical exponent of Viennese Academic painting, which exerted a profound influence on Hungarian art for a considerable period of time. He was already an elderly man when he moved to Hungary. Don�th became a friend of the writer Ferenc Kazinczy, a leading figure of the Hungarian Enlightenment, and it was his recommendations that opened the way for Don�t to became one of the most popular portrait painters of the 1810s and 1820s, one of the great periods of portrait painting among the nobility and the higher circles of the bourgeoisie. Don�t also produced altarpieces and mythological compositions.
Woman Playing the Lute well represents his reliable, a little too tediously executed, Neo-Classicist portrayals, in which the personality of the model is barely captured; instead, the painter seems to have been taking more enjoyment in idealizing his models. He did not strive for the kind of representation typical of Baroque paintings; instead, his portraits were much more characterized by a certain detached decorativity.
Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 2 minutes):
Francesco da Milano: Tre fantasie for lute
