Apart from the monumental nude compositions the portraits constitute an important trend in the painting art of Szőnyi's group. Commenting on the Reading Man which was made in the same year as The Danaides, and displayed in the same exhibition as that picture, Károly Lyka wrote: "that other life in Arcadia is replaced here with real life". Szőnyi's family members and relatives play a special role in his pictures. In the double portrait of his parents (the picture was displayed in the exhibition of 1921 in the Ernst Museum) the picture opens up next to the curtain hanging behind the elderly couple leaning against the table, and lets the viewer have look at an outstretched landscape. The Reading Man was obtained by the Museum of Fine Arts in 1924, and it became an exhibition item of the New Hungarian Picture Gallery opened in 1928. The picture shows the artist's father. The sunbeam that loosens the forms is projected onto the figure depicted from waist up and comes through most probably a window from behind the figure whose outline appears against the backlight. This painting follows the compositional pattern and light-treatment of Rembrandt's Reading Titus now kept in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and other artists were also inclined to use this type of representation in this period of time. Aba-Novák's Dr. János Kovács' Portrait shows a close acquaintance of his, in fact one of his peers in the army. The man figure appearing in the slanted backlight thus receives a nimbus-like framing, and his form is imbued with a majestic calmness that is otherwise characteristic of nudes and portraits.
Placing the sitter in front of a curtain drawn somewhat apart has always been a preferred solution in neo-classicist portraits. The landscape that becomes visible in the background - following the example of Renaissance archetypes - sets off the semi-figure and complements the composition as a tone-setting background. Erzsébet Korb's Girl's Portrait is perhaps identical with the Contemplation exhibited in the Ernst Museum in 1923, and this is even more probable based on the old hand-written vignette stuck on the stretcher of the picture on the backside, labelled 'The Thinker'. Despite the title-giving - that is so typical of Korb's, by the way - the features of the face imply that it is the portrait of a specific person, however the identity of the poser, whose physiognomy and hair-do looks familiar from other Korb paintings, cannot be determined. Patkó also painted portraits of similar setting, but in his pictures - contrary to Szőnyi's, or Aba-Novák's portraits - it is not the light effects that are dominating; as the emphasis is rather on the characterisation of the figures. Contrary to the gaze of Korb's Girl Portrait that scrutinises the viewer, Patkó's poser is not looking at us, instead he is musing and - just like in Imre Nagy's painting titled The Portrait of Manci Rigó - the sitter's loose hands are dropped one on the other. The span of the picture that follows the old tradition and the posture of the figure regularly reappear in international neo-classicism, too, although in a completely different stylistic rendering: Georg Schrimpf's female portrait reflects the Neue Sachlichkeit's non-idealising concept.
In Szőnyi's self-portraits another person accompanies often the artist's figure: in 1923 he depicted himself with his mother. The artist "places himself in the favourite romantic pose of Hungarian self-portraits, positioning man and woman expressively in contrast, or the young strength with the contemplations of life's fall", as in this picture, as István Genthon put it. And indeed, the picture is constructed on the typical contrast of the Szőnyi artworks: the crouching, broken and old woman in the background serves as a counterpoint to the strong young man standing in the foreground. The figure hiding in the depths of the picture's space is a recurring element in Szőnyi's other pictures as well (for instance the Nude in Front of a Red Drapery). The composition of My Mother and Me is repeated in an early double portrait of Géza Vörös' made in similar style, but here the mother's figure is substituted by another Szőnyi motif, a female nude. In one of Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba's painting dated 1922 the female nude poser appears as an equal peer of the artist.
The year 1924 was an especially important one in Szőnyi's life: he married and moved to the village of Zebegény in this year. In his picture entitled My Wife and Me Szőnyi used his representation style built on contrast pairs - familiar from earlier portraits - in an even more condensed way: the literally highlighted main character of the picture is looking to the side showing her pronounced profile outlines, and does not establish a contact with the viewer, while the artist's figure hiding in the background and depicted from the front is looking straight at us. With his dark colour tones Szőnyi again evokes the artworks of Rembrandt or Hans von Marées in this double portrait.
In the same year when the My Wife and Me was painted, i.e. in 1924, their first child, Zsuzsa was born, and from this time onward the series of pictures becomes richer with a new group of works, that of child representations. Máriusz Rabinovszky begins his criticism of Szőnyi's third collective exhibition in the Nyugat literary magazine by describing an outstanding piece of these pictures, the one entitled Zsuzsa with the Wooden Horse that was made in 1927. Although by this time the artist had said good-bye to theatrically set, costumed portraits, this picture still preserved some elements of the earlier portraits: an empty wall can be seen behind the figure of frontal view - just like in the small-sized Zsuzsa-portrait painted a year earlier - and the little girl is standing beside the hanging curtains looking at the viewer like an adult, with a serious look. The real novelty of this picture is its colour scheme. In the late twenties Szőnyi had moved away from the dark colouring of the early paintings and was now "spreading out the beauties" of his new colours "into the silent light, tasting them one after the other, and throwing their living nacreous fibres beneath the breathing air".
In October 1924 Aba-Novák and Patkó - together with Masa Feszty - held a joint exhibition in the Ernst Museum. The most precious painting in Aba-Novák's collection - at least judged by the price - was the one entitled Family. This was probably identical with the large painting known as the Bath. The painter's life-mate, his future wife can be seen in the picture, but she is not depicted here in the usual way, such as a nude poser or in a portrait. Instead, Kató here appears in the role of the mother in the company of two children. They are however not her own children, as their daughter, Judit was born only in 1928. The motif of mother with child and that of family appeared in his previous artworks, mainly in his drawings, but only as complementary elements of nude compositions. The older boy reaching into the washbasin looks similar to the caricatured figures of the copperplates. Aba-Novák had in fact used the motif of the table cutting across the foreground like a banister earlier, in his horizontally widened, elongated picture entitled Ironing Woman. The dark pictures originating from 1924 still have a brownish tone, and their brushwork - such as in the case of Eta is Bathing - is greasily 'pastose', and nothing implies the change in style that would take place one year later.
The members of the Szőnyi group depicted primarily their family members and close friends in their portraits. Painting portraits to order was rather rare. But the painting of Dezső Kosztolányi's Wife and Son belongs among these. According to family legend, Aba-Novák came into contact with the Kosztolányi's through dr. János Kovács, whom he had also portrayed. This order meant a new challenge for the artist. From a comparison of this picture with the earlier portraits and self-portraits it is apparent that this portrait - although in terms of style it fits in well with the other artworks made in this period - is more reserved and more conventional in its general effect than those ones. The composition is still broken down by powerful light-shadow contrasts, and the plastically modelled forms are softened by faint colours. Mrs. Kosztolányi - who was a writer herself under the pseudonym of Ilona Görög - had been painted earlier in the 1910s by Ödön Márffy, too. In this picture she can be seen as a mother with her son, Ádám. The full-dressed child sat on the arm-rest, with his snub-nosed profile and schematically painted, rigid extremities looks funny in contrast with the majestic posture of the woman in her carefully arranged dress, holding an open book in her hand.
The representative portraits of the famous figures of the age - or their relatives - were often painted on the account of more direct relationships. Erzsébet Korb's Man Portrait depicted the reputed photographer, József Pécsi (1889-1956) with whom the painter may have got acquainted through her sister: József Pécsi took several photos of Flóra Korb. (The Korb photographic portrait published in reproduction in a monograph written by István Genthon was probably taken by Pécsi.) The Pécsi-portrait is a repetition of Korb's Self-Portrait with its composition centred in a flood of light, but its painting style changed in the meantime: the earlier harsh representation is replaced with a softer perception, the dark and cold colours are taken over by softer shades. The figure of József Pécsi wearing an old-fashioned, tight-necked short jacket "resembles in many ways the energetic posture of the busts of the Italian Quattrocento", and we know that dressing in historical costumes was nothing strange to him, as evidenced by his photograph taken by Frigyes Widder and one of his bereted self-portraits. The community of friends connected to the members of the Szőnyi group included several artists who were active in other areas of arts. For instance, they were close friends with another photographer in the early twenties, André Kertész (1894-1985), who later received worldwide recognition. Kertész made several photographs of the members that gathered in Aba-Novák's miserable dwelling. They may have been introduced to Kertész - who was the same age as Szőnyi and Aba-Novák - by Károly Patkó, who was one year their junior, because both of them had attended the Budapest downtown modern school (Reáltanoda). Beside the members of the Szőnyi group - Aba-Novák, Szőnyi, Patkó and Korb - the painters Róbert Novotny E. and Imre Czumpf, the sculptor Pál Pátzay or the graphic artist Gyula Zilzer also belonged to the group, but we have no information on whether any of them painted a portrait of Kertész.
Another one of Károly Patkó's portraits (1925) testifies to other connections. The painting shows a well-known actress of that age, Ilona Dajbukát (1892-1976) who performed in peasant roles together with her husband, István Bársony, from the year 1924 in the theatre of Andrássy út. In the year when the picture was painted, she played the part of the widowed Mrs. Mikula in the Városi Theatre's one-act comedy entitled Shepherd Boy, Poor Shepherd Boy. The Hungarian theatre magazine, Színházi Élet published a number of photos of the play, and it seems probable - judged by the very similar dress of the actress in these photos - that Patkó depicted her in this actress' part. The author of the play was Rezső Török who belonged to the group of friends of the Aba-Novák's from the twenties. Probably it was through them that the young artists got to know the Dajbukát's, who by the way possessed a number of paintings, among them several valuable Aba-Novák artworks (Double Portrait; Light). The portrait of the actress dressed up as a peasant woman follows the compositional pattern of female half-figures often seen in Patkó's artworks - bathing nudes, breast-feeding mothers or daydreaming portraits - and we do know a painting made in Felsőbánya (today: Baia Sprie, Romania) in the same year, for which the poser was a gypsy girl tucked up in a shawl. Nevertheless in the case of the Dajbukát-portrait it was not a studio dress-up but a 'real' one, a 'real' role-play, as the almost obligatory red background drapes of the earlier paintings is here transfigured into a stage curtain: the scenery of the picture is situated in a real stage.