While the artworks of the Szőnyi group member artists made in the early twenties were for the most part characterised by the inclination to follow conventional genre categories, as time passed, the boundaries between the individual picture types got slowly washed away. From the middle of the decade the focus shifted from the categories that had been distinguishable earlier to landscapes and genre scenes, for which the members of the Szőnyi group sought motifs by wandering in various places. Szőnyi first visited Zebegény in 1923, and he moved here with his wife in the next year. They lived solely in this place up until 1930 and the village remained the artist's main source of inspiration until his death in 1960. His most favoured ones of the variegated land motifs included the Danube bend and much more often the view of the surrounding hills, as seen in the early etching Hillside. Szőnyi's last visit to Nagybánya (today: Baia Mare, Romania) was in 1918, but Patkó, who as a college student had come here together with Szőnyi in 1914, revisited the colony in 1924, and exhibited his drawings in a summer show. The next year, in 1925 Patkó attracted several Budapest-based painters, including Aba-Novák to the small mining town of Felsőbánya (today: Baia Sprie, Romania) lying in the hills close to Nagybánya. The picturesque land, the running streams, the romantic mountains and the daily routine of the local people made great impression on the artists arriving from Budapest, and local motifs can be seen even in their pictures painted years later. Beside Vilmos and Kató Aba-Novák, Emil Kelemen, Ernő Bánk and Lajos Fonó - among others - spent the summer here from May up until October. The plan was that Imre Nagy - with whom they co-studied at the beginning of the decade in Olgyai's class - would also join them, but by the time he arrived in Felsőbánya, the Aba-Novák's had left for home. Nevertheless, the summer in Felsőbánya proved to be a single occasion only, as the Aba-Novák's did not return in the following year. For some time the artist friends painted around the Aba-Novák's home in Zugliget, then in 1927 a larger company of theirs visited Igal in Somogy County. The tiny colony recruited to this place was able to spend the summer here thanks to the hospitality of a physician, dr. Sándor Baumgartner, and as autumn arrived, they moved over to the nearby Törökkoppány, where also a local doctor, dr. Andor Németh had invited them. The typical motifs, the sweep-pole wells and navvies of Igal, the bridge of Törökkoppány and the peaky church tower of the village that bathed in sunshine appear in the works of all of them. Apart from Aba-Novák and Patkó, the other participants of the Felsőbánya summer - Emil Kelemen, Lajos Fonó and Ernő Bánk - also worked in Somogy, and others also joined the company. From among the latter, Jenő Barcsay and Jenő Medveczky had been the dwellers of the so-called 'Genius Magazine', i.e. the gypsum store-room of Stróbl's sculptor class at Epreskert in the early twenties, just like Károly Patkó, and probably that is where their relationship dates from.
The year 1925 marked a turning point in the development of the Szőnyi group's art. Erzsébet Korb had painted her last large compositions, and the major artworks of her oeuvre appeared on a posthumous display in the Art Gallery's Nude Exhibition. The works of the other members of the Szőnyi group were also presented at the Nude Exhibition. Patkó and Aba-Novák each displayed a picture made in Felsőbánya, but both of them had painted here a self-portrait each, and these testify to the transformation of this genre. Aba-Novák - just like Szőnyi in his painting of a year earlier - painted himself together with his wife, in the year of their wedding, in his Double Portrait. Aba-Novák's half-figure dressed in a blue smock and his head turned into a three-quarter profile, as well as his affected hand gesture all look familiar from the other self-portraits, but it is also distantly related to Szőnyi's Self-Portrait of 1919 depicting the artist in the act of drawing. Standing beside the artist's figure Kató appears, and we know of a stand-alone portrait of her with a similar setting: in that portrait painted by Lajos Fonó in Felsőbánya she is holding a stick in her hand, just like here, but she is also wearing a broad-rimmed straw-hat. The third character of the Double Portrait is a dog, i.e. the kid of the Kelemens' Doberman that belonged to the Aba-Novák's until 1928, the year when their daughter, Judit was born. At that time the dog was given as a present to Eszter Mattioni, an artist who had painted in Igal, too, and in whose double portrait - depicting her together with her husband - the same dog, called Betyár, also appeared.
Károly Patkó's Self-Portrait In a Hat has the same setting as his Self-Portrait of 1922, with the difference that here the artist is depicted in his work-clothes with a brush and palette in his hand and the studio shown in dramatic lighting is replaced with a delightful background landscape. Patkó's slender body is framed on two sides each by thin stripes: a house on the left and probably the canvass fixed on his easel on the right, showing the edge of the picture being painted. The broad-rimmed straw-hat appears also in this picture, and Patkó repeated his self-depiction in a similar hat in his self-portrait made years later. The artists working at Felsőbánya had a predilection for wearing the so-called Kapnikbánya straw-hat, and Emil Kelemen also depicted himself, Patkó and Aba-Novák in similar headwear in his painting. Documentary photographs also confirm that Patkó actually wore this type of hat, and they provide evidence that even the summer in Felsőbánya provided a good occasion for 'dressing up for a role': Patkó and Aba-Novák put on the loose rustic shirt - just like their women wore chemise in a group photograph taken two years later in Törökkoppány - and donned the local folk dress.
In the Nude Exhibition of the Art Gallery displaying more than four hundred artworks at the end of 1925 Szőnyi put on show his picture entitled At the Peak. This work was awarded the youth prize of the exhibition, and the Museum of Fine Arts purchased it immediately. From 1928 onward the picture could be seen at the permanent exhibition of the New Hungarian Picture Gallery that opened in the same year. The sketches of the At the Peak take us through the phases of producing the composition. In the sketch-drawing that was probably made earlier - just like in the painting - the dressed-up figure is standing on the right hand side, and Szőnyi deleted from the final version the nudes standing left of him in the front, together with the dogs lying by their feet. In another sketch the basic pattern of the composition is fully identical with that of the finished artwork, however the figures appearing in the strong sunlight in front of the low horizon have taken over each other's places. With this picture Szőnyi reached a point where he had to face a dilemma. While light was emphatic in the tone-painting of the early twenties, it did not remain the tool for the plastic rendering of masses, as the "local colours of intensified worth" came more and more to the foreground, permeating the forms with greater intensity and breaking up the integrity of the surfaces, and these served as the transition to the 'plein air' colouring soaked in reflex colours, characteristic of Szőnyi's following artistic epoch.
The location and characters of At the Peak are not unfamiliar: both male figures of the Danube bend at Zebegény are the artist himself, who can be recognised from his self-portraits in which the plasticity of his features are manifest: the artist's face reappears always in different forms in the various representations. But behind the ever changing - sometimes more square-like, sometimes more oval - faces some kind of common trait, i.e. the artist's identifiable personal physiognomy can still be detected, and so the faces of the two figures in At the Peak look familiar based on his other pictures. In a photograph taken in the twenties, the artists is standing in swimming drawers on the riverbank and behind his slim body the Danube bend at Zebegény can be seen. The preliminaries of the ready-to-act male nudes standing high in front of a background landscape can be found in the pictures of Károly Kernstok. As an example, the similarly set composition of the Two Nude Boys bursting with energy can be cited. However, it is uncommon for an artist to paint himself as a nude, and it is even more unusual that two characters of a picture are the duplicates of the same individual. The closest analogy could be found in the Alter Ego of Erzsébet Korb's painted a few years earlier. Although in both pictures one figure is dressed-up and the other is naked, yet they are different in many ways. Szőnyi's figures are of equal rank, and they are standing in the same posture in a symmetrical arrangement. They are not confronted with each other; instead, they look as if they had been born from each other as duplicates. And yet, it looks as if they were two different individuals: the faces are different, that of the right hand side figure is broader and his body looks also more robust. They are not looking at each other, although only some guesswork can be made as to where they are looking based on their head postures, as one cannot see the direction of their gazes coming from the shadow of their eye-sockets.
Who are these two figures? Should one consider them as the representations of the dual personality in man, just like in the Alter Ego? Szőnyi had depicted himself in double self-portraits earlier, too; he had painted himself with Jenő Pászk when he was still at school, with his mother in 1923, and with his wife in 1924. But in 1925 Szőnyi is confronting himself with himself after his mother and his wife, as if he was striving for some kind of self-identification. Szőnyi seems to have reached the end of his series role-testing self-portraits by painting this picture. The everyday scene is elevated to symbolic meaning by the use of various components. The title apparently does not suggest more than a mere identification of the place, but the setting and tone of the representation relate back to it and lend it a new interpretation. The situation has no biblical or mythological connotations, yet it is permeated by a lofty and heroic atmosphere. And although the noon sunshine is other than the transcendent light-cataract of the previous pictures, yet it draws the monumental figures into a festive flood of light. Thus the landscape becomes the supernatural environment of the figures that have grown gigantic and superhuman. The picture calls to mind Lorinc Szabó's poem, titled Szédület (Giddiness) from his volume Light, Light, Light of 1925 mentioned above: "I am standing on a hilltop. - Oh, clouds, / hear the call of your soaring spirit! / I demand what's beyond man." It is as if the man turning his head to the left and looking downward symbolised Szőnyi's former self: he is taking his leave from the mythological-allegorical nudes with the nakedness of his ideally slender body that is reminiscent of Apollo statutes. He seems to close his first artistic epoch with his own nude depiction. But he is not only looking back, instead the upturned head and distant-searching gaze of the right hand figure with his suntanned body and dress point toward the rural people of Zebegény that enter his art in the following epoch.
It is evident that both Aba-Novák and Patkó then working in Felsőbánya prepared themselves for their participation in the Nude Exhibition held at the end of 1925, as they inquired about the type of artworks with which they could apply for participation in this 'major nude exhibition', in a letter written in the summer of that year, from Elek Petrovics, one of the organisers of he exhibition: whether semi-nudes or compositions consisting of several figures, not exclusively nudes, would be accepted. Finally both of them submitted a painting of theirs painted in Felsőbánya. Patkó presented his Rest During Harvest. Patkó prepared his artworks after careful studies, and we know of his smaller-sized 'Second Sketch' to this picture, and it demonstrates that by the end of August the painting was fully developed in his mind. In addition, he sent a documentary photograph of the now latent oil sketch attached to his letter addressed to Dénes Csánky. The Rest During Harvest serves as a kind of synthesis of the neo-classicist style of the Szőnyi group. The cool colours and hard forms of the early pictures are now dissolved in the warmth of sunshine. Gradually, Szőnyi and his fellow-artists said goodbye to the Golden Age, in which - as referred to in some picture titles, too - 'spring was to stay here forever', and the blooming summer was finally followed by the arrival of tired autumn. The duality embodied in the figures of the At the Peak can be observed in Patkó's picture, too: on the right hand side, under the shade of the tree, nudes and semi-nudes half-dressed in ageless robes are resting, while on the left hand side people dressed in casual are busily submerged in their work.
Aba-Novák displayed his Hair Combing at the Nude Exhibition. The small-sized oil sketch still testifies to the effect of the composition of Bath painted the year before, but the final piece moves far away from the paintings of the earlier epoch, and the change in style is perceptible even compared to the paintings made up to that point of time. The dark monochrome tones that got stuck in the browns are torn apart by reflex colours vibrating like prisms, but the atmospheric trembling of purple and pink, turquoise and crimson shades do not harm the plasticity of the bodies. This overwhelmingly sensual and spontaneous picturesqueness is amply described by Ernő Kállai's lines written on the 'temperament' of Hungarian painting: "Whenever we make artistic creations drawing from the passionate or animated entirety of our awareness of life, we embrace space with apparent voracity, and create a congestion of plastic forms. Our brushwork, blossoming colours, and forms bursting with energy are rich in the dense, tasty material, and indulge in the gorgeous rendering into painting of our flesh-and-blood instincts."
The number of nude compositions apparently decreased following 1925, and even these were rather nude scenes positioned in everyday milieu. Károly Patkó's oil painting, Bathing Women is dated 1926. The picture is an evocation of the situation depicted in Szőnyi's After Bath made in 1921. The picture seems to have been made in Felsőbánya, although it is not known whether Patkó really visited the place in that year. According to the recollections of Emil Kelemen he, his wife and Károly Patkó toured Transylvania in the spring of 1926, but visited places much further off than Felsőbánya. However, it was at the time of painting the first pictures that they discovered that the large amount of linseed oil that they had taken with them on their journey was in fact castor oil, and so the paint did not dry up. Consequently, they had to return home, and they sued the manufacturer for damages, claiming that the factory - mistakenly - sold them some material that was unfit for painting. The India ink sketch of the Bathing Women shows only the two female figures and a comparison of the preceding Felsőbánya landscape piece with the oil painting reveals the obvious similarity of the backgrounds. On this basis one may presume that Patkó did not paint this nude piece on the spot, but somewhere else - probably in an atelier - and borrowed the background from the townscape of the previous year.
The most outstanding pieces of Károly Patkó's early painting art are the monumental nudes placed in a landscape. The nude composition entitled Nudes Outdoors (1926) is a continuation of the trend characteristic of the Rest During Harvest. Patkó tested the carefully arranged setting of rounded, soft-bodied figures in graphic preliminary study, and the grid-screen used for enlarging them to their final dimensions makes it obvious that the artist had used this tool directly for painting the picture, although some differences can also be detected between the two versions: the male nude with his arms apart on the sketch-drawing was eventually replaced by partying figures. The mundane, but history-evoking version of carousing scenes - addressed earlier - were executed in Patkó's art not only as open-air nude compositions, but also as indoor scenes with dressed-up figures.