Agria 38. (Az Egri Múzeum Évkönyve - Annales Musei Agriensis, 2002)

Bakó Zsuzsanna: Egy „nemzeti toposz” születése. Gondolatok Székely Bertalan Egri Nők című képe kapcsán

outnumbered them many times over. Rather than focussing on Dobó, Székely decided to build his picture around the figure of a woman bearing a sword, in doing so managing to express the magnitude of a struggle against all the odds. We know that each of Székely's canvasses was preceded by painstaking studies, a number of compositions and colour sketches, as well as drawings and oil studies. This proved no different in the case of The Women of Eger. The first sketch was made in Brassó (now Brasov, Romania) in 1856, followed by sketches made in Nagyszeben (now Sibiu, Romania) and Munich in 1857. Indeed, he worked on the composition right up until 1860. During the course of the drawings what had been a horizontal composition ultimately became vertical. The stonethrowing female figure rises imperceptibly from the crowd before forcefully stepping forward and wielding her sword in a violent fashion at the cowering Turks in what is the key element of the composition. The picture painted in 1867 probably at the behest of Eötvös was preceded by a several oil studies. Bertalan Székely succeeded in producing a work pregnant with emotion encapsulating the virtues of patriotism, self-sacrifice and heroic struggle in an image with an appeal which is as universal to mankind as it is specific to the Hungarian cause. 324