Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 20. (Budapest, 2001)

Zsuzsa GONDA: Walter Crane's Visit to Budapest in the Context of Museums' Acquisitions

tion of prints and drawings within the Esterházy collection, by the acquiring contemporary works of graphic art. It was with that intention that Térey bought, from a German art dealer, Walter Crane's woodcut Triumph of Labour (picture 2), which he proceeded to display the following year at an exhibition entitled Modern Prints. This is how Térey described the artist in the catalogue of the exhibition: "[Crane] is among the best-known painters and draughtsmen of England today. ... He is one of the most exciting pioneers of the applied arts."

13 In 1898, the public was introduced to 200 acquisitions at an exhibition of graphic art organised by Térey. At the same time the Museum of Applied Arts hosted the show Modern Art, organised by Jenő Radisics with the intention to indicate contemporary trends of decorative arts. Walter Crane was represented by tapestries in the exhibition curated by Radisics. In 1899, Gábor Térey took part at an auction in Berlin where the Seeger collection came under the hammer. Térey came to the event in order to procure works for the Museum of Fine Arts, under construction at the time. At the auction he managed to obtain paintings by Fritz von Uhde and Wilhelm Leibi, but as competitors had got wind of his intention to acquire works by Böcklin and Crane, too, these pieces were sold at exorbitant prices, so Térey's plans were thwarted.

14 Ernst Seeger had bought several pictures by Walter Crane at the 1893, Berlin, exhibition of the artist. Crane himself remarked on Seeger 's rich collection, and it was from this that he took many of the illustrations for his memoirs.

15 Commenting on the Berlin-based collector, Crane summed up the ambivalence that cast a shadow over his entire career as an artist. Although it was his greatest ambition to be appraised on the strength of his paintings, his renown was, and still is, based upon the illustrations he made for children's books. "It seems curious," he observes, "that most of my principal pictures should find homes in Germany. ... Possibly, apart from any artistic quality, the symbolic and figurative character of their subjects are more in sympathy with the Teutonic mind ... and, though a painter before I was a designer, I had been labelled 'Children's Books' or 'Arts and Crafts', and it is preposterous for a man to expect to be recognised without his usual label - besides, it disturbs the commercial order of things."

16 Although it was not Crane's major works that Seeger sold at the auction, references in the contemporary press to the high prices fetched suggest that Térey intended to buy paintings. And yet what he bought at the Budapest exhibition were only watercolours, perhaps because he did not find the works on offer representative enough. His acquisitions represent various creative phases and fields of the artist's work. They include two landscapes: The Sherwood Forest and Penpoll Bay}

1 During his travels Crane regularly painted watercolours, which were particularly well represented among the pieces offered for sale in Budapest. Contrary to the symbolic representation of nature characterising his canvases in oil, his watercolours display a more naturalistic approach. The watercolour from 1881 rendering a part of the Sherwood forest

18 displays the influence of a work from Crane's early period. In 1862 he had illustrated John Capel Wise's work entitled The New Forest: Its History and its Scenery. While engaged on the assignment, Crane travelled with the author to Hampshire where he made his first plen-air sketches. It is to this trip that his interest in woods and trees can be traced.

19 The composition of The Sherwood Forest arranged into lanes, also witnesses to Crane's flair for the decorative. With its vivid colours, the watercolour, painted in 1897 of Penpoll Bay, possibly preserves the memory of a holiday spent in Cornwall (picture 3).

20 Achieved in the watercolour is an even more balanced blending of naturalistic style with the decorative approach associated with Art Nouveau, here suggested by the twisting boughs of the dry tree standing by the bay. Térey's choice of landscapes was not accidental, as due to the personal preferences of the founder of the graphic art collection Miklós Esterházy (1765-1833) the genre had already