Horváth János: Kunffy Lajos, 1993

His grave can be found by the entrance to his atelier; a portrait of him in relief is on the gravestone. The government purchased his entire estate from his widow and in 1979 his manor house was declared a memorial museum. In it is furniture that belonged to him as well as his со lection of paintings, representing his life's work. Visitor:; may see the manor house in its original setting at Somogytur, along the highway due south from Balatonlelle. Lajos Kunffy's total artistic output numbered about two thousand pieces, By far the most numerous are his oil paintings, but he also did pastels, drawings, aquarelles and cil sketches and even one or two pieces of sculpture. This number, unfortunately, includes pictures that were destroyed during the second World War or stolen since: about a thousand pieces, all told. His works can be found in Paris, Rome, Milan, Bucharest and Budapest/Most of his works, however, are in the hands of private collectors. A few hundred of his works are in private collections in Kaposvár. The largest collection of his works can be found in the Rippl-Ronai Museum at Kaposvár, where over three hundred oil paintings, pastels and drawings are housed. This collection was selected by the artist himself after having donated twenty of his major works in 1952, among them Job and The Child's Funeral. Later he continued to make generous donations to the> museum. Kunffy was a master of plein-air painting. Yet, he also worked in other styles as well. His early academic style (The Prophet Jeremiah, 1895) was exchanged for a short romantic period inspired by Munkácsy (Job, 1896.) This was followed by the Secessionist period (On the Coast of Brittany, 1898; My Wife in the Palm House, 1903). EBÉDVIVŐ ASSZONY, 1929 air technique in the spirit of Nagybanya (The Child's Funeral, 1907). His hands often treated the paint brush with the same lightness and virtousity as did the Impressionists; sometimes he reduced to dots his subjects (Congress, 1918, In Front of a Tunis Cafe, 1913), at other times somberly realistic observations created his genre paintings (Noontime Meal of Harvesters, 1921; Life of a Farming Family, 1926). In his last artistic period, light, impressionistic and pastel tones show the painter's wisdom: that with simplicity one can express more (Still Life with Melon, 1930; Garden Path with Shrubs, 1935). Let Kunffy's ars poetica conclude this essay: „I have learned from many but imitated no one. My While searching for ways to express the motifs of his homeland he summarized his artistic experiences in plein-