Székely Zoltán: Arrabona - Múzeumi Közlemények 50/1. (Győr, 2012)
Tanulmányok - Mészáros Ágnes: Két orientális kép a győri Xántus János Múzeum gyűjteményében
ARRABONA 2012. 50/1. TANULMÁNYOK TWO ORIENTAL PICTURES IN THE COLLECTION OF THE XÁNTUS JÁNOS MUSEUM OF GYŐR The article deals with two oriental pictures - an oil painting and a watercolour - preserved at the Xántus János Museum in Győr, which have never been studied before. In the absence of any signature or dating as well as any detailed documentation concerning provenance history, only the pictures can give a clue to the investigation of their original art historical context. The oil painting shows a small group of travellers in the middle of a desert in Northern Africa, attacked by a wild beast (apparently, a tiger). The artwork formerly belonged to a local private collection that was donated to the museum in 1980. In 1903 the city of Győr organised an exhibition of artworks in the possession of local art collectors. In lack of any surviving copies of the catalogue, only a rough list of the exhibited works, painter and owner names could be reconstructed by previous research. However, even this approximate list contains important hints at the identification of the painter. Based on this, the author proposes Leander Russ, a 19th century Viennese painter, one of the earliest oriental artists in Austria, as the painter of the oriental scene in Győr. The watercolour shows an ancient Egyptian temple ruin. Presumably, the picture did not stand on its own originally, but formed part of a series of temple views and townscapes depicting spectacular sites along the Nile Valley. It was the Déscription de I’Egypte that served as first and foremost model for any 19th-century pictorial representation of Egyptian sites. Picture table nr. 40 in the first volume of the Antiquités shows exactly the same building, and precisely from the same viewpoint as the one on the watercolour - the temple of Com Ombo, situated north from Assuan. A parallel can also be found in a lithographed travel album published by a Hungarian painter, Libay Károly Lajos in 1860. Ágnes Mészáros
