SZINYEI MERSE, Pál

Similarly to the Impressionist painters, most notably Monet, Szinyei Merse, too, noticed that the contrast between the greens and the reds of the meadows interspersed with the bright red of poppies create a fantastically vibrating image in the eyes of the viewers. This theme enabled the painter to return, after the long years of silence, to the colour schemes dreamt up in his younger years. Of the pictures showing poppies - painted in 1895, 1896, 1900 and 1902 - the 1896 version entitled “Poppies in the Field” is the most interesting, alongside with is variation painted six years later, “Poppies in the Field”. Although in a slightly different arrangement and format, this painting shows the artist’s favourite components of landscapes in a similar composition. Due to the vertical format of the picture, the blue sky with the white clouds, as well as the peasant woman and her son walking along the yellow path, are given greater emphasis.

Of all the versions, this one is the best thought-out, with the most balanced colour composition and the best representation of the Hungarian countryside’s character.

Like many of his other works, Szinyei painted this picture in Munich, but it has none of the spirit of the Academy there. It is a brilliant picture sketch inspired by a Hungarian scene. It shows the maids hanging out the washing in the garden in the summer sunlight, with the “young master” looking on. (The picture was also exhibited under the title “Young Master”). As in his picture sketch “The Swing”, Szinyei was primarily concerned with translating light into colour. He disregarded the academic rules and painted his visual experience in carefree composition. He grasped the essence of Impressionism, although he had no knowledge of the similar endeavours by French artists, had never been to Paris, and had only seen the realist paintings of Gustave Courbet and some very early works by Edouard Manet at the International Exhibition at Munich (Claude Monet painted his firs Impressionist painting in Grenoble in the same year.)

The portrait shows the young wife of the artist. Significant as it may be in Szinyei’s oevre, it means a step back in comparison with “Picnic in May”. The female figure with the landscape in the background is not in harmony with it. The picture was painted in the artist’s studio. It is interesting to note that his wife devorced Szinyei in 1887 and died at the age of 101.

With this picture, Szinyei carried on with the subject matter of “Picnic in May” after a break of several years. He painted the landscape from memory, but he had a model to pose for the nude. Details of the compositions, i.e. the landscape, the nude and the sky, are not in closely connected, so the picture, no matter how beautiful it is, does not rival “Picnic in May”.

Time after time, Szinyei returned to the theme of a party relaxing in the outdoors, proceeding systematically from the sketches made for his first plein-air painting in 1867 to the final version of “Picnic in May”, “Lovers” also forms part of this process: a colourful group, in this case two people, is shown on a hillside. Instead of the previously preferred gardens at springtime, now the early summer meadows are chosen as scenery. In the evenly dispersed light the pale local colours are harmoniously adjusted to one another. This gentle colouration establishes the lyric, effect of the picture. The interlocking eyes, the masterly execution of the hands, the softly curling outlines within the closed composition and the dreamlike background all contribute to the intimate atmosphere of the painting.

The fine Naturalism of the picture reminds the viewer of Bastien-Lepage’s Haymaking (1877, Paris, Mus�e d’Orsay). This is interesting from the point of view that around 1890 the Nagyb�nya painters, who could be regarded as Szinyei’s followers, were all enthusiastic about this particular French painter, yet at the time they still could not have seen the early works of Szinyei, which were held in America. This meant that the contimuity of Hungarian painting suffered a setback.

Szinyei made friends with B�cklin, who was also working in Munich. Szinyei asked for B�cklin’s advice when he painted “Picnic in May”, which can be considered as his most significant picture. The picture shows a group of people sitting on a hill. They are enyoying the cool shadow of a tree off the picture. The picture gives the same impression as those of French impresssionists, only the technique is different. He painted the landscape from memory in his studio, leaving the place for the figures which he painted one by one after models at various times. The figure who is lying on a blanket and eating a leg of chicken is the painter himself.

The picture did not have a favourable acceptance: his fellow artists and even B�cklin did not appreciate it. Szinyei wanted to give it as a present to the Hungarian National Museum, but it did not accept it. The painter and his picture were not appreciated until the Millennium Exhibition in 1896.

The artist who had an unbiased and humble approach to landscape attempted to create a clear and simple composition. He soon found diagonal composition which best suited his character and gestures, which kept on returning in a lot of his works in a number of variations. The picture shows again a slope, as in Picnic in May, or Snowbreak. As another compositional bravura, the artist placed figures walking uphill in the focus of a semi-circle of flowers. However small those figures are, they dominate the picture.

Szinyei Merse started painting landscapes with poppies in 1895 which continued the colours of his youth. Like Monet of the Impressionists, Szinyei Merse also noticed that the contrast of red and green in the field full of poppies produced a fantastic vibration in the eyes of passers-by. The vibrating air around landscape and figures in the sunshine does not allow details to unfold. Thus, all elements of the picture merge with the harmony of uniform vision in spite of its intensive colours. The picture with poppies painted in Jernye in 1902 is the subtlest of all versions and expresses best what the Hungarian landscape looked like on a bright summer day.

The artist never accepted commissions to paint portraits; all the portraits he painted featured members of his family. These representations, each of which is a pearl of intimate Realism, reach the soul of the model. Szinyei began to paint portraits of this wife on several occasions, but he was not always able to finish them, because his wife, in sharp contrast with Szinyei’s contemplating character, was ever so busy that she had difficulty tolerating the modelling sessions. She set both for the famous “Woman in Lilac Dress” (1874) and for the “Portrait in Shawl”. The latter portrait was not finished in 1880: the deep scarlet coloured velvet dress his wife is shown wearing was completed only around 1890, long after the couple’s divorce in 1887. (In actual fact Szinyei’s daughter was sitting as model.) The painting is dominated by the delicate and sensitive beauty of the model’s face, radiating from the background of warm colours. In Szinye’s pictures, the women are often shown wearing in their hair or on their hats colourful flowers, or as in the case of “Portrait in Shawl”, laces and ribbons. We can almost be certain that he did not use them just to conform with the fashion of the age. These colourful patches were necessary to emphasize the beauty of the face and the fine rosiness of the skin, as well as to produce a definite separation from the dark background.

The immediate inspiration for this painting, one of the artist’s most original ideas for a picture, came from his brother in-law’s balloon ride in 1878, as witnessed by Szinyei. This is recorded in the subtitle “B�la Probstner Bids Farewell to S�ros”. Following this balloon ride, Szinyei’s brother-in-law left for a long journey first in Western Europe and then in the Far East, in the course of which he even spent a few years in Japan. In the painting which conveys an optimistic mode, the striped balloon triumphantly reigns over the sky. The person high above is no longer interested in his fellowmen swarming below; his eyes rest on the line of the treetops. He floats, drunken of freedom, thus becoming the symbol drunken of freedom, thus becoming the symbol of the free flight of thoughts, the freedom of art which does not disappear into cosmic distances, but remain close to Earth, the living environment of people.

Szinyei made his firs attempts at “plein-air” painting, the type of representation that aptcures the shimmering atmosphere around the objects, at the same time, but quite independently from the French Impressionists. “The Swing” is one of the most beautiful of the “plein-air” picture sketches he painted in Munich at the beginning of his career. It is a fresh colourful scene with natural, loosely linked figures, the flying swing, sunny walls and patches of sunlight on the dresses.

Just like the Impressionists, Szinyei was also mocked for his originality. One of his colleagues called this picture a “fashion plate” because the figures were in contemporary clothes and not in the traditional historical or folk costumes. Szinyei was so upset that he never painted the full-scale work he had intended. Later he gave it to J�zsef Rippl-R�nai who discovered it as an early Impressionist masterpiece.The Neue Pinakothek in Munich offered him 4,000 marks for the sketchs, but he would not part with it. Later, however, he could not resist the 15,000 crowns offered him by Marcell Nemes, the Hungarian art collector who lived in Munich.

The picture came to the Museum of Fine Arts from the legacy of Marcell Nemes.

You can view other representations of the motif “The Swing.”