DEÁK-ÉBNER, Lajos
(1850, Pest - 1934, Budapest)

Road of the Wood Mallows



c. 1880
Oil on canvas, 37 x 78 cm
Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Deák-Ébner found his own style in 1875 when he first went from Paris to Szolnok in order to spend the summer there. The peculiar atmosphere of the town in the Great Hungarian Plain and its crowded markets liberated artists who visited Szolnok. The surroundings matched the plein air vision of A. Pettenkofen, Tina Blau and other painters who came from Austria, and Deák-Ébner and other Hungarian artists who followed them to Szolnok. They attempted to reproduce vivid life rather than academic structure and composition. While a narrative character dominated pictures of Deák-Ébner involving a lot of figures, he avoided constraints of subject matter in his early pictures: informal style founded on colours and playful patches appeared undisturbed.

The picture portrays an intimate episode of life in the country. The love of life of people rivals with the splendour of nature they live in harmony with. The artist uses his favourite composition pattern: similarly to Harvesters Returning Home painted in 1881, surroundings and people have the same direction. What makes the landscape more interesting and novel, is that flowers on the left became more stressed as the picture format was made wider, thus the small figures appear to be walking right in the middle of friendly summer nature.

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