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 - Eszter Krisztina ACZÉL: Mother-and-Child and Child Representations by József Borsos

ESZTER KRISZTINA ACZÉL lVlotner-and-Lnild ana Child Kepresentations by J ozset oorsos In the Age of the Enlightenment, the creeds of individual freedom and equality brought radical changes in the fabric of society. Beginning with the second half of the 18th century, there was a steady increase in the number of publications about the life of women, all dedicated to the education of young females. A new type of woman, one that embodied the ideals of the Enlightenment, also began to emerge from literary and art works. These representations conveyed the notion that women were less rational creatures than men. The sole purpose of a woman's existence was to serve the wellbeing of her husband and her family. A study of the literature on the subject of Enlightenment in Hungary has shown that the ideas of Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists relatively soon spread to Hungary and the works of the German authors also exerted considerable influence. Many of the comments in the first Hungarian press debate about women, their place in society and the need for their education included references to Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft, the instigator of the first suffragette movement in the modern age, as well as to the writings of Kant and Fichte. In the 1840s the debates about the education, the life and the rights of women continued on the pages of the weekly papers. The majority of the contributors questioned women's right to autonomy, and believed that the education of women and the definition of the female ideal was a matter to be decided by men. The consensus view was that the arena for women's accomplishments must be confined to the households and the salons. However, in the second half of the century the participation of women in public life grew more acceptable. Artworks entitled Motherly Joy formed a popular topic in the efforts to restrict the scope of girls'education and women's place in society to the hearth and home. The miniature painting (III. 45), now only available in reproduction, was probably made by Borsos. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller's composition The Joy of Motherhood (private collection) from 1847, which depicted a mother and her children in front of a peasant's house, was exhibited still in the painter's lifetime. As far as composition is concerned, this painting closely resembles József Borsos' work entitled Alms, along with another painting by August von Pettenkofen, a close friend of Borsos'. Entitled Education (III. 67), the latter depicted a grandmother teaching her grandchild. The common element that links these works is that they are all based on Christian iconographical types emphasizing the sanctity of motherhood. Another one of Borsos' works known only in reproduction is Mother and Child (1844, ill. 46), which shows a woman in sideways view, holding her reclining child in her lap. The theme of lactation had a special significance in the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century. As early as 1759, Jean-Baptiste Greuze already exhibited a similar composition at the Paris Salon. Also, by the 1780s the number of family scenes and representations of lactating mothers had grown significantly at the exhibitions in the Salon. By the 18th century the custom of placing newborn children in the care of wet nurses for the first two or three years had become widespread among French families. The philosophers of the Enlightenment started to criticize the practice of employing wet nurses and encouraged mothers to breastfeed their own children in an effort to reduce child mortality. Idealized representations of lactating females began to appear in the second half of the 18th century not only in paintings, but also in representations of contemporary fashion of the period, and even on chinaware. In the late 1780s, essays on breastfeeding and on the education of midwives began to appear in Hungary, too. There was an article in the press in 1830, entitled Against Wet Nurses. This confirms that, similarly to the situation in France, the institution of wet nursing still existed in the middle of the 19th century in Hungary, while also suggesting that a unified posi-