Majorossy Judit (szerk.): A Ferenczy Múzeum Évkönyve 2014 - Studia Comitatensia 33., Új Folyam 1. (Szentendre, 2014)

Szentendre. Adalékok a Pajor család, a Pajor-kúria és a Ferenczy-család történetéhez - Martos Gábor: Két talált kép „megtisztítása”. Ferenczy Valér ismeretlen nagybányai művei egy magyarországi magángyűjteményből

Studia Comitatensia 2014 - Yearbook of the Ferenczy Museum - New Series 1 - English Summaries

Györgyi B. Juhász -József Lángi

Addition to the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Home Culture.

The Summary of the Painter-Restorer Investigations of the Pajor Mansion in 2012

The restorers’wall investigation in the Pajor mansion in Szentendre (5 Kossuth Lajos Street) had started in 2008 and the second step was in 2010. At that time the work was done by Ferenc Zweiber and Ferenc Springer. Their aim was to locate, recover and give suggestions how to present those inner wall paintings valuable from monument conservational, cultural historical and artistic points of view. Already at that time the restorers have found inner wall decoration fragments from several decades of the nineteenth century in each room of the first floor as well as in one of the rooms on the ground floor. The restoration works on the whole building then started in 2012 when Gyöngyi B. Juhász and József Lángi expanded the wall investigation also to the other rooms and the corridors of the ground floor as well as to the facade.

According to the earliest available written sources, the first buildings on the present plot were an eighteenth- century, two-storeyed house on its northern border and a one-storeyed edifice along the street line. These were significantly enlarged and joint to each other in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The property was first owned by the Serbian Lovcsanszky family (who might have run an inn there) and after the marriage with the elderly orphan of this family, it got into the hands of the Protestant Caspar Pajor. Around the turn of the twentieth century then Gyula Krausz bought the plot, but in the 1920s the whole complex was already transformed to the purposes of a Protestant secondary school. After the state confiscations in the late 1940s the building had several functions until the Ferenczy Museum move its main exhibitions here in 2013.

The restorers had identified that the eighteenth-century facade of the main, street line building was painted with a mortar plaster coloured with coal and its architectural fasciae were whitewashed, while nothing could be recovered from the Baroque period on the northern building due to the significant later alternations. By the early twentieth century the whole mansion received an ochre colour outside but the architectural decorations were still painted white.

The inner wall decoration, on the other hand, of the eighteenth-century period, could be identified in none of the rooms any more. However, the nineteenth-century, decorative wall paintings were significant and their recovered fragments made it possible to prepare for each room upstairs a theoretical reconstruction. Unfortunately, such reconstructions in Hungary were done in a very few cases, since these home paintings usually fainted away and even the monument conservational reconstruction of the 1980s and 1990s did not consider them valuable for conservation and precise documentation. Therefore, the comparative investigation of the nineteenth-century civic home culture as far as the wall paintings and the inner decorations are concerned is in a rather early phase. However, the situation in the Pajor mansion of Szentendre was quite fortunate. Due to the formerly applied good technique, the different levels of the painted wall decorations were preserved under one another on a relatively large surface in each room upstairs.

In the article the authors summarized the characteristics of all the decorations and levels in each room of the first floor and in the single room (where such decorations was found) on the ground floor. The earlier wall paintings of the nineteenth century that were revealed imitated mainly painted curtains on the walls, while in the later decades such patterns were used that followed the wall paper patterns (e.g. small flowers, laces, lilies, leaf motifs, palm leafs). After the two world war periods the rooms were painted in one colour (usually white).

On the other hand, the former ceiling decoration was identifiable in two rooms only, otherwise the original ceilings vanished and they were usually painted white. In one room (E14), however, the traces of brown and deep claret fining decoration was found and in another, later separated bigger room (E16—E17) an embellished rosette stucco imitation with decorative fines around, painted in pink, green, drab and brown strips and surrounded with foliage motifs were discovered.

The window and door frames of the earlier nineteenth century were reddish brown that was also rather popular then elsewhere. In addition, it was discovered that in the period when the Protestant school functioned in the building complex, these frameworks were painted in green.

The quality of the painting of the Pajor mansion was extraordinary in comparison to the nineteenth-century urban home culture of provincial towns. Unfortunately, none of the revealed fragments were put on display due to the different museum (exhibition) functions of the rooms, but they were protected and stuck down by the restorers in the hope of a possible future presentation.

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