Buzási Enikő szerk.: In Europe' Princely Courts, Ádám Mányoki, Actors and venues of a portraitist's career (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2003/1)

Enikő Buzási: ÁDÁM MÁNYOKI (1673-1757) Conclusions from a Monograph

Enikő Buzási ÁDÁM MÁNYOKI (1673-1757) Conclusions from a monograph" Hungarian art history ranks Ádám Mányoki among the most important masters of Hungarian Baroque painting, although he only worked in Hungary for two brief periods of a few years. This special attention can be ascribed first to the quality of his output, which raises him far above the average portraitist in Hungary in the period, and second, to the close ties between his career and the events of early 18

th-century Hungarian history (unlike other Hungarian contemporaries who went abroad, for instance, Jakab Bogdány and Tóbiás Stranover, who both settled in England). The works he made for his Hungarian clients are an integral part of the history of this genre in Hungarv. Mányoki is still widely associated with the person and court of Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II, although this stage of his professional life was unknown in Hungary until the end of the 19

th century. Although from the mid-18

th century, German and French biographies of the painter make mention of his service rendered in Rákóczi's court, the first Hungarian literature dealing with him - János Korabinszky's encyclopaedia published in Pressburg in 1786 - excludes this information. Not even Ferenc Kazinczy, a prominent literary figure of his time, knew about this period, as his letters relating to Mányoki reveal, although Kazinczy was a close friend of a personal acquaintance of Rákóczi, Gedeon Ráday, the son of Pál Ráday, Rákóczi's diplomat.

1 The "discovery" of the painter was actually made by Hungarian historians dealing with the age of historicism. Their interest in his activity for a long time was motivated by the research on Rákóczi in the last decades of the 19

th century and the appeal of the kuruc era.

2 His works - such as the portrait of Ferenc Rákóczi II of 1707, and pictures of János Podmaniczky, Pál Ráday and his wife - were first to appear in historical and art exhibitions in the years around the turn of the century, while some works of his were presented to a wider public in the international Baroque exhibition at Darmstadt in 1914.

3 It was at this exhibit that art historians first learned about several important works of his, and when Ferenc Rákóczi II's portrait of 1712 - then still in the collection of the Saxon ruler - was first put on public display. The painting entered a Hungarian public collection as the gift of Marcell Nemes in 1925, a move celebrated by the Hungarian cultural community. The return of the picture marks symbolically the beginning of the scholarly investigation of Mányoki's lifework according to the standards of that age, since along with his donation, Marcell Nemes started a foundation for the study of Mányoki's works and the writing of his biography. This prompted Béla Lázár to write a monograph published in 1933. He was the first to survey, apart from the biographical data and (in part) the sources, the lifework of the painter, unfoundedly attributing numerous paintings to him, some of which have since proven to be the works of others.

4 The research - and source publications - of the ensuing years focused primarily on Mányoki's activity in Hungary: the years spent in Rákóczi's service, the months in Gdansk where the prince lived as an emigre, and the painter's second stay in Hungary, of which Mányoki's correspondence with his patron Pál Ráday still provides the most valid picture.

5 A milestone in the exploration and summary of the facts was the commemorative Mányoki exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in 1957, which added pieces by Kupezky and Bogdány, as well as a few works from the National Museum in Warsaw, to the works found in Hungarian collections.

6 The greater part of the Mányoki oeuvre, which almost wholly belongs to German court portraiture, is still preserved abroad, mainly in German areas, the one-time venues of the painter's activity. His unusual life-story itself with its periodically changing locations explains this situation. Mányoki was born into a Calvinist minister's family in 1673. At twelve, he was sent to live with foster parents in Celle near Hanover, in the duchy of BraunschweigLüneburg. After a brief stay in Lüneburg, then Hamburg, he settled in Berlin in 1703, where he received commissions from the heir to the throne, Frederick William. He first came to Hungary upon the invitation of Rákóczi's wife in 1707 and served Rákóczi as court painter until 1712 - first in the prince's court until 1709 and later abroad, in Berlin and the Netherlands. Before he emigrated to France, Rákóczi recommended the painter to Augustus II (the Strong), king of Poland and elector of Saxony. From then on, Mányoki executed royal commissions in Warsaw and Dresden, sometimes in Berlin and Dessau. In 1717 he was promoted to court painter in Saxony, with clients among the affluent merchants of Leipzig, while still receiving commissions in Dresden. After a brief sojourn in Prague and Vienna, where he painted, among others, the daughters of Charles VI, the infants Maria Theresa and Maria Anna, he returned to Hungary with the intention of regaining