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After completing his studies abroad, János Tornyai settled in Hódmezővásárhely, the town of his birth. It was mostly due to his efforts that the most characteristic branch of what is called the Alföld School, depicting the landscape and people of the Great Hungarian Plain, became associated with this town. Small farm standing alone in the vast flat land provided the most characteristic form of livelihood in the Alföld; both in literature and in painting, these became the symbols of the life of the Hungarian peasantry, of underdevelopment, of isolation, and of poverty.
Tornyai painted "Farm on the Great Hungarian Plain" around 1910; in it he depicted the barrenness and despairing tranquility of the small farms by relying on pictorial means which are small in number but powerful in effect, revealing, among other things, the artist's compassion for his subject.
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