Horváth János: Kunffy Lajos - A somogytúri Kunffy Emlékmúzeum katalógusa (Kaposvár, 2005)

*£~^*^> again. After the fighting the young Adolf returned to the County of Somogy to oversee the agricultural prosperity of his estates. By a great deal of industry and clever husbandry, he acquired vast estates. The Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, ennobled him for his outstanding contributions to projects that aided the national economy and because he was a member of the Economic Council of Kaposvár. He also wrote about his Italian adventures and had them published. Although his farming was originally practiced in Orci, then in Galosfa an Varga, he and his family lived in middle-class fashion at heir home in Kaposvár. Lajos Kunffy completed his elementary and high school education in Kaposvár and spent his school holidays in the estate villages. As a young school child his noteworthy talent for drawing was cultivated first by the Italian painter Alois Galimberti and later by Otto Koroknyai, who, incidentally, was then active in Somogy. It was said that if Lajos Kunffy found no paint, he would concoct colors from various grasses. After matriculation, he went to the university in Budapest to study law and concurrently attended an art academy and took drawing classes. There he had to draw models made of plaster for Professor Janos Greguss. In order to practice painting techniques, he copied Gyula Benczúr

's great canvas, The Farewell of Laszlo Hunyadi. During the second year of his law studies, he also started to draw live models in the then-fashionable studio of Pal Vago. He spent his third year of law school complying with the requirements for compulsory military service. Then, in 1890 he left for Munich, which was one of the centers of artistic life at the end of the nineteenth century There he attended the private art school of Simon Hollosy for a year and acquired his appreciation for the impeccable rendering of details in drawings. He experienced the enthusism that was shared by Hollosy and his circle for the intimate, pale-toned and airy outdoor paintings of the French Bastien Lepage. Under the sigh of this guiding star Hollosy, Ferenczy, Reti, Ivanyi and Thorma returned to their homeland to found the Artistic Free School at Nagybanya. They painted according to new ideals, especially plein-air naturalism, which later Kunffy himself cultivated. At this time, however, he was still laboring to refine his basic artistic skills. In the spring of 1891 he enrolled in Professor Hackl's class at the Academy of Munich. But with the artistic news emanating from Paris, he would stay only half a year in Munich. By autumn, we find him in Paris, a student at the Julian Academy. His mentors, Jean Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant, were the outstanding representatives of contemporary French genre painting. Lajos Kunffy worked with diligence for three years there and grew in cultural sophistication. He became friends with other Hungarians living in Paris, among them his compatriot from Kaposvár, Rippl-Rónai, and also with Karlovszky Pataky Nándor Katona and István Thorma. In 1894 he felt his artistic studise were completed. „The three years spent at the Julian, from the 22nd to my 25th years, were years of happiness, full of hopes for artistic success. We saw life and the future as fabulous. Everybody was full of good cheer, because, after all, we could do anything our hearts desired. During our work the young men were singing and jesting, of course, mostly the french ones," recalls Kunffy. 64