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Expressing their love for the nation was especially important for the artists of Hungarian Romanticism. Miklós Izsó's shepherd and peasant figures - which were the first examples of the portrayal of typical Hungarian folk characters in the form of sculpture - were the equivalents of those genre paintings which depicted scenes from the lives of the peasantry. Izsó was still a student at the Munich Academy in 1862 when he carved Sad Shepherd after a live model, his brother, dressed in an ethnographically authentic attire worn in Bugac, a region of the Great Hungarian Plain. In the matter of payment there was some argument between Izsó and Mihály Gschwindt, the person commissioning the work, which eventually had to be settled in court. After winning the case, Gschwindt donated the sculpture to the Hungarian National Museum to everyone's satisfaction. Acknowledging that this statue opened a new phase in the history of Hungarian art and culture, Izsó's contemporaries - among them Imre Henszlmann, Károly Keleti and Mór Than - showed a great appreciation for this statue, which reflected the ideas of the poets Sándor Petőfi and János Arany.
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