Takács Imre – Buzási Enikő – Jávor Anna – Mikó Árpád szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve, Művészettörténeti tanulmányok Mojzer Miklós hatvanadik születésnapjára (MNG Budapest, 1991)
RAJNAI, Miklós: Tobias Stranover 1684-1756
very briefly the stories, often too vague and fanciful for comfort, recounted in a copy of a manuscript written apparently by Stranover's daughter. It seems that Stranover came to England as an eighteen year old youth 13 soon after his father's death, leaving behind a country in great turmoil, trampled by imperial armies and in the throes of an impending uprising. A letter written 25th September 1715 in London by Pápai Páriz Ferenc, the son of the famous Transyh/anian doctor and intellectual, informs us about the year and circumstances of Stranover's immigration. We are told that in order to find a suitable portrait artist, Pápai Páriz consulted the Szeben painter Jeremias Stranovius' younger brother, Tobias, who excelled in painting especially birds, flowers and fruit and who came to England thirteen years before with William Paget the English ambassador on the way home from Turkey via Transylvania. 14 Indeed Lord Paget, the English ambassador extraordinary to the Ottaman Porte, 15 did travel through Transylvania and Hungary in 1702 arriving in England in the Spring of the following year, and he did bring with him several youths from these countries, as part of his retinue. 16 The next documents so far discovered which contain Stranover's name are the Parish Registers of the two best known churches in the very heart of London: St Martin-in-theFields and St Paul's Covent Garden. His son Charles was baptised 30th July 1721 in the former and his daughter Susanna 21st January 1725 in the latter. 17 The date and place of his marriage to Elizabeth Bogdáni have not come to light yet, neither do we know her date of birth. But we cannot be far wrong placing it on or about the turn of the century as all the other known children of Bogdáni were born between 1696 and 1701. We have already seen that Elizabeth survived her husband and we also know that she was left twenty pounds in her brother William's will of 21st August 1758. Whether she was still alive to receive it when William died thirteen years later is an open question. There is no mention of her - one would not really expect it - in her nephew's last will and testament of 27th December 1789 in which William Maurice Bogdáni leaves to "Lieutenant Charles Stranover Son of my late much honoured father's Sister twenty pounds". Her daughter Susanna is the presumed author of the original of the lately surfaced manuscript discussed later. To return to the 1720s, 1724 was an eventful year in the life of the Stranover family. By the death of Elizabeth's father, the apparently prosperous Bogdáni, they came into substantial properties at Finchley on condition that they gfve up Elizabeth's rightful claim on her share of the properties in Hitchin (which were transferred to William in their entirety earlier). In addition they were left the furniture and masses of household utensils stored "in the kitchen and back Garrett" in Bogdani's dwelling house in Great Queen Street. The three years old Charles received as a special bequest his grandfather's "larger Silver Cup". 20 The inheritance involved the Stranovers in some property transactions concerning the leasing of the "Tenement with the Appurtenances with the Barne Orchard Yard and Garden to the same adjoyning - Situate hying and being in ffinchley ... near unto the Church there". Four such transactions are recorded in the Middlesex Land Registry. 21 It is in William Bogdani's correspondence with Maurice Johnson, founder of the Spalding Gentlemen's Society, that we come across him again, in 1733. The erudite and scholarly William was a member of the Society and a close friend and kinsman of Maurice who was the steward of the Hitchin manor of the Bogdanis. 22 Maurice in his 23 letter to William of 5th May sends his greetings to Stranover and in the postscript of William's letter of five days later to Maurice we read the interesting news: "My Brother Stranover and all his family desire you will accept their Compliments they are preparing to leave England & be for some time in Germany, so that I shall soon return to the Tower again." 24 Five months later, 4th October 1733, it is again William reporting to Maurice Johnson that gives us an interesting glimpse of Stranover and his family: "I have just received a Letter from Mr Stranover with the News of his safe arrival at Vienna, but that his family had been very ill upon the Road they having been 5 times attacked wth. Fevers which he happily cured with the Lapis ... He at present give me but little Accot. [i.e. account] of his Travels but desires you will please to accept of his and family's humble Service." 25 This journey and the remark that he intended to "be for some time in Germany" makes one suspect that this continental visit is the explanation of the reference often made from 1762 26 onwards to a long stay in Germany. There was of course no time between his early summer departure and his arrival in Vienna by 4th October to paint the pictures now in Hamburg and Schwerin, even less the huge canvases which serve as fresco or tapestry substitutes in the Garden Room of Schloss Ahrensburg, but these could be the fruits of a post-Vienna (and Hungary-Transylvania as well?) period These German pictures certainly await further explanation as their concentration within a small area of Germany cannot be without some significance for the story of Stranover's life. And now let us consider the manuscript which came to light during the 1989 Bogdáni exhibition. The title of this manuscript is History of the Prince of Moldavia, and judging by the nature of several notes in it in the same hand, it is a copy probably dating from the late eighteenth - early nineteenth century. A note on the title page informs the reader that it was written by Mrs Gordon, granddaughter of James Bogdáni, for Mrs Clayton a sister of Sir Everard Buckworth, 30 Mrs Smith's father. Inside one finds a verbose and what looks like a highly romanticised story of Bogdani's life until and including William Ill's death and containing some information on Stranover's early life as well. It makes frustrating reading because Mrs Gordon is hell bent on making as much as possible of her forefathers' (probably invented) aristocratic roots and to eliminate or at least minimize that they were professional artists, also because it is singularly devoid of dates and place-names vital to the story. However, as time to time one comes across certain details that presupposes an intimate family knowledge in the writer, it needs to be taken seriously, at
