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One of the most important centres of Hungarian art in the twentieth century is Szentendre. Lajos Vajda spent the entire six years of his creative life there, from 1935 to 1941. The old streets of the little town on the Danube, the towers of the Greek Orthodox churches and the golden glitter of the iconostasis reminded Vajda of his childhood in Serbia. 1935 and 1936 were important years in his art, especially his drawings. It was then that he developed his characteristic composition of intricately constructed line drawings, and the few pale pastel and tempera works that were built primarily on line expression. Making use of his experiences in photomontage during his stay in Paris, he took objects - folk art objects, motifs of Szentendre, everyday articles - out of their original surroundings and transformed them into the two dimensional plain of the picture, arranging them in free association. These objects formed his range of symbols.
The work is a splendid example of this technique, with its Baroque church tower, plate and knife, half-peeled orange, and the windows of a peasant house. The entire picture is dominated by the pale autumn colours of the small town. The deliberation of the composition never contradicts the emotional content, the dreamlike surrealist character of the picture.
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