Woman Playing the Lute

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