Veszprémi Nóra - Szücs György szerk.: Borsos József festő és fotográfus (1821–1883) (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2009/4)

BORSOS JÓZSEF, A FESTŐ / JÓZSEF BORSOS THE PAINTER - Sabine GRABNER: „Wonderful work, it could almost be Amerling's!". József Borsos'Student Years in Vienna

SABINE GRABNER "Wonderful work, it could almost beAmerling's! JÓZSEF BORSOS' STUDENT YEA RS IN VIENNA The art and cultural scenes of Hungary and Austria were always intricately intertwined, and it was never more so than in the 19th century. The Art Academy of Vienna, which had a very good reputation everywhere in Europe in the decades immediately before and after 1800, had much to do with this.The institution was headed by Friedrich Heinrich Füger, an artist of modern views who traveled extensively.The imperial seat became an intellectual magnet for artists of various nationality already during the Napoleonic wars, and remained so in the following decades. That there were a large number of young Hungarian art students among them, is all the more understandable, since neither Pozsony (today Bratislava, then the capital of Hungary) nor any other large cities of the Kingdom could boast an art education institution of the same international standing. To identify any student who studied at the Academy in the first half of the century, one would need to consult the student registers held in the archives. While the majority of the names have by now sunk into oblivion, some of them could still ring a bell, as these names appeared in the catalogs of the annual exhibitions of the Academy or on the - sadly incomplete- lists of artists of the Kunstverein. (Founded in 1830, the society was officially named Verein zur Beförderung der bildenden Künste.) In order to provide for its members, the society organized an exhibition and public sale of their works every summer. From our point of view, however, much more important were the reviews published in contemporary newspapers about the exhibitions.These shows posed a great challenge to the young artists: they offered an opportunity to give evidence of their professional skills and the progress they had made. In 1845 József Borsos achieved remarkable success with his portraits shown at the Academy. The Emir of Lebanon (Cat. No. 5, ill. 9), with which Borsos generated a great deal of public interest two years earlier, along with the portrait of the young piano phenomenon, Carl Filtsch (Cat. No. 9) shown at the 1844 exhibition of the Academy, can faithfully demonstrate the "unbelievable progress" Borsos made "in such a short interval". In an article published in Sonntagsblätter, Eduard Melly wrote the following: "As for the expressivity of colours and tonal effects, only Amerling can beat Borsos." The twenty-four-yearold artist must have thought the latter remark especially flattering, since a favourable comparison with Friedrich von Amerling was probably the greatest prize a portrait painter could possibly hope for. By that time, Amerling had been one of the most renowned painters of the imperial seat for many decades: only Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller and perhaps Franz Eybl could have had a claim to call themselves his eguals.The works of Amerling and Waldmüller made significant contributions to the development of a new concept in portrait painting.They both had come to the conclusion very early on in their career that it was possible to reconcile the representation of dignity and wealth with the naturalistic portrayal of the sitter's personality. No one could interweave the real with the imaginary as sublimely as Amerling. Focusing on the personality, he combined the depiction of the sitter's external appearance with his or her individual emanations.The unigueness of his paintings was the result of balanced composition, the exceptional luminescence of the colours and the virtuoso light effects. Amerling's style of painting may have exerted a powerful influence on Borsos, too, but as for the existence of a master/pupil kind of relationship, it only came later, if at all. Borsos arrived in Vienna to enrol at the Academy in the autumn of 1840. His artistic development seemed phenomenal from the start, which lent some credence to the view that he would have been able to develop his style of portrait painting even on his own, without any external influences. We need to point out here that there were no classes in portrait painting at the Academy at the time, nor was there any chance for Borsos to