Following the summer of 1925 spent at Felsőbánya (today: Baia Sprie, Romania), Aba-Novák and his friends did not travel to far-away places, instead they painted in the surroundings of the Zugliget home of the Aba-Novák's, in the Buda hills. The Self-portrait with Pipe made at this time is a repetition of the settings in drawings created at the beginning of the decade, and a continuation of previous self-portraits. The preliminaries of the attributes and the seemingly spontaneous, yet well-calculated gesture can all be found in the pictures known from earlier, while the colour-scheme manifests the purplish-pinkish reflex colours of pictures created one year before.
One member of the Zugliget colony was Ernő Bánk, who had visited Felsőbánya also. The artist who was almost a decade older than his fellow artists painted pictures that testified to the influence of Aba-Novák's art, and two of his artworks are linked to the creation of individual pictures - self-portraits - in such a way that they are a kind of 'documentations' of how these works had been created: his picture entitled Vilmos Aba-Novák Painting can be recognised as the Self-Portrait with Pipe.
Two years later, in the summer of 1928 spent in Igal, Ernő Bánk painted a portrait of another member of the Szőnyi group, Károly Patkó. In this picture Patkó is looking straight at his own life-sized portraiture and one might think at first glance that the artist is sitting in front of a large mirror. Although the artist's posture supports this idea, but a few years ago a Patkó self-portrait appeared in auction that makes it obvious that the artist - in this portrait - is looking at his own self-portrait that he has just completed.
The genre of self-portraits - although pushed more and more to the background - did not disappear from the art of the Szőnyi group members. The costumes and the attributes have disappeared, and the painters depicted themselves in natural situations. Aba-Novák is smoking his pipe, Patkó is observing his just-finished painting in the bright sunshine, and Szőnyi in his Self-Portrait of 1928 is facing us with a brush in his hand. Despite the lighting that pours down from above and still looks familiar, despite the background that becomes lighter as if by a halo, and despite the pronounced light-shadow contrasts, the setting does not convey the feeling of reserved role-playing, but rather that of intimate directness. The beam of light animates the forms, but does not dissolve them, and it looks as if Szőnyi modelled the friendly-toned face emerging from cold-blue colours from clay, because of the thickly, greasily applied paint.
And in the painting entitled Rowers - for the first and the last time - the 'Szőnyi-Aba-Novák-Patkó triumvirate' can be seen together. The Rowers owned earlier by the National Board of Physical Education and disappeared during the war depicts a group of men standing, walking on the bank of the Danube flooded in bright sunshine, looking like ancient statues. The central figure imitates the posture of Polykleitos' Doriphoros (Pikeman). Szőnyi prepared this picture in a number of variations. The softer compositional sketch does not concentrate on the monumentality of the figures or their clustered arrangement; instead, the emphasis is on the pictorial values, the light-imbued patches of ochre shades and blues. In another oil painting Szőnyi painted separately the three figures on the right hand side of the group of rowers gathering on the riverbank, and the writing on the back of the picture identifies these figures with three members of the Szőnyi group, 'Patkó, Szőnyi, Aba-Novák. Zebegény'.
Some naked male figures do sometimes appear in the pictures painted in the second half of the twenties. Although a few of Szőnyi's artworks refers back to the epoch of heroic nudes, the situations and people that appear in his art are more and more common and everyday. The Waterside Scene purchased at his third collective exhibition of 1929 marks a transition between two epochs: the male nude with a shining body still originates from the previous artistic period, but the figures on the right hand side are representations of the world of Zebegény rural people. The composition is divided into two by a thin young tree positioned in the central axis, and the two sides are shown from different viewing angles, as if they were not related at all. The boys preparing for bathing - both of them are still naked in the oil sketch - are standing at eye-level, but the artist depicted the family standing on the riverbank and the boat deliberately from above. The arrangement of the figures is careful and conscious, but the majestic restful poses give way to more natural body postures: Szőnyi fixed the bending movements of the undressing boy and the man tying the boat as if in a snapshot. As Ervin Ybl befittingly wrote on Szőnyi's latest works in his criticism of his collective exhibition of 1929: "From the perspective of drawing, only the outlines are important in the figures, although these are not sharp contours, as they are dissolved in the light, but still they ensure the conclusive colour patches of the individual figures. (...) He emphasises the plasticity of the forms with broadly pasted colours including the reflexes, but these do not break up the integrity of the figures. Although the figures are in close unity with their environment, the artist does not compromise the decorative emphasis on the arrangement of the figures in space, their outlines and their relationship with the background."
Apart from the 'empty' Danube bend landscapes Szőnyi often depicted figures as well in his paintings. Although in the neo-classicist trends of the 1910s and 1920s the horse and horse-rider depictions gained a marked importance, they are rarely seen in the painting art of the Szőnyi group. In the Horses in the Yard, the horses appearing in front of the Zebegény country are basking in the all-radiating sunshine, just like the human figures elsewhere. The enclosed forms of old "can no longer maintain their definitely massive bodily existence. The heavy masses that appear in Szőnyi's first stylistic epoch must partly get dissolved. In the face of such brightness the solid outlines of the bodies can no longer subsist."
In addition to self-portraits the depictions of family members continue to have an eminent position. Green reflex colours dominate the garden scene floating in a flood of light, and the picture - just like the Bath - continues to unfold the family theme, and follows the parapet-like arrangement of the composition, nevertheless its setting could be familiar from the Double Portrait of the previous year, too. Judit, the Aba-Novák's daughter was born only in 1928, and in this picture Kató is feeding Gergo, the son of their painter-friend, Róbert Novotny E., which shows that the Novotny family were also there in Zugliget in the summer when the painting was created.
The pictures painted on his family actually form a separate group within the Szőnyi oeuvre: these are the portraits of his parents, then his wife and finally his children. The motif of mother and child has been present in Szőnyi's art since the birth of their daughter, Zsuzsa. This theme plays an important role in the graphic works of Béla Uitz made in the 1910s, and is common in the attempts of the representatives of international neo-classicism, too. In the pictures of the Italian Achille Funi or Mario Sironi the influence of monumental renaissance Madonna pieces can be observed, just like in Szőnyi's picture entitled Mother, in which their second child, Péter - born in 1926 - also appears next to Szőnyi's wife and Zsuzsa. The intimate group of the family cuddled up together oblivious of everything is loosened up by the light and the composition is imbued with the nacreous colours of a one-year earlier painting, the Zsuzsa with the Wooden Horse. By this time the quasi-prophecy of Artúr Elek written on Szőnyi's low-keyed, near-monochromic pictures became a reality: "The effort to smooth out everything, and get a tone of the whole containing the particular... has so far dimmed their fire and suffocated their independent existence. But the hour of liberation will certainly arrive, when the joy of suppressed colours will burst through the browns of the general tone..."
Apart from the self-portraits and the intimate family scenes a number of pictures depict the various figures in common, everyday situations, generally in the process of some work activity. The comically stooping puny figure of the Grinder with his feet set wide-apart in Aba-Novák's large painting that barely indicates the environment of the scene, marks a new milestone in the artist's human representations that tend toward caricatures. This motif painted probably in Igal reappears in one of Ernő Bánk's pictures, too.
The Kitchen was created in the same epoch, but it displays an unusually complex compositional pattern in comparison to Aba-Novák's previous artworks. The spatial elements placed one behind the other diametrically give a strong sense of picture depth, and the old woman sitting in front of the table can be seen from above. Not much light is shed on her figure, her face remains in the dark dim of the shadow, and the glimmering surface of the table behind the dark patch of her clothes and the still-life details are softened by the atmospheric effects of the light pouring in through the window. The artist often individualised the figures in his anecdotal scenes, and we know that the bald-headed poser for the painting entitled With a Bottle-gourd was a neighbour living in Zugliget, called Sumics. Behind him human figures are sitting at the table, drinking wine and this motif would become the starting point for one of the most important trends in Aba-Novák's art.
In contrast to the carousing scenes that gain a symbolic meaning, the eating-drinking company in Aba-Novák's art is always - even in his compositions of biblical themes (Mene, Tekel, Ufarsin) - a gathering of mundane, down-to-earth figures. The theme of the Drinkers painted so many times later on, too, gets unfolded in front of a reddish-brown background in this picture, and the awkward and grotesque figures of the card-playing and drinking men tend to sink into the low-burning, densely hatched colour patches.
The metropolis continued to remain alien to the members of the Szőnyi group, and townscape motives only rarely appeared in their pictures. The representations of everyday life were not connected to modern metropolitan lifestyle; instead they drew inspiration from simple, traditional rural life. Just like Szőnyi, the Aba-Novák's also lived in a quasi-village setting, the district of Zugliget, Budapest between 1924 and 1927. Their home was a stamped-earthed summer kitchen "in the side-wing of a battered old inn". It is probable that the Scene at Zugliget shows this inn situated along Csillagvölgy street that was frequented by market-women commuting to Budapest. This painting of intimate atmosphere was made before the change in style dated from his Igal visit, and the pictures sliced up to extremely colourful and lighted-up stripes. The picture's tint-sketch is known, and just like its tempera version of a few years later, it is rendered in a stubbier format, but lighter and softer perception.