Kárpáti Zoltán - Liptay Éva - Varga Ágota szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 101. (Budapest, 2004)
ANNUAL REPORT 2004 - A 2004. ÉV - PUBLICATIONS - KIADVÁNYOK - ENIKŐ BUZÁSI: Ágnes Szigethi, Old French Painting, 16—18th Centuries
ÁGNES SZIGETHI, OLD FRENCH PAINTING, 16-1 8TH CENTURIES, The Collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest, vol. 6, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest 2004, 215 pp., English, 95 col. ills., ISSN 1416-3896 ^^^^^^^^^^ K ^^^^ m ^^ m A new volume has been published in the series launched in 1996 by the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, which introduces the collections of the Museum in concise, easily surveyable units. Ágnes Szigethi 's work presents the sixteenth to eighteenth century French paintings of the Old Masters' Gallery in Hungarian and English versions. The reader, with the author's detailed exposition of 96 paintings, i.e., the most important information regarding the painter, the iconographie elucidation of the artworks, and above all, with the summary that is extremely comprehensible even to the layman, in spite of the antecedents in research and the currently valid viewpoints, is led through the determinant tendencies and most outstanding oeuvres of the French painting of the era. The volume follows the tradition of the best of the classical descriptive catalogues, or more precisely, carries it further, in so much as it comprises all that we generally demand today from such a publication: research history, up-to-date readiness of the literature and the conclusions in connection with the work, and furthermore, the demarcation of the place of the painting in art history, within the œuvre, with respect to related works, in the series of analogies, and in all probability, together with the problems and tasks still awaiting resolution. The series admittedly does not aim for the professional. Nevertheless, if we would like to become acquainted with this section of the collection in as much depth as Ágnes Szigethi 's book provides us with the opportunity for, we could hardly turn elsewhere. Here, namely, essentially everything is summed up that can be known about the given artwork. The survey of this monograph of the sixteenth - eighteenth century French painting of the Museum of Fine Arts serves with new lessons not only with regard to the representations of French art within the collection. The most exciting chapter of the collections of the Museum renders it strikingly easy to follow: the collecting history, and within that, the shift in the taste of the collectors, in connection with the epochs and painting schools touched upon. It is not by chance that the author herself also emphasises this in the preface to the volume, since the fate of some three-quarters of the old French paintings of the Museum of Fine Arts can be traced back to their arrival into the Hungarian collection, if not always beyond that. Thus we are informed that Robert Tourniére's elegant family portrait derives from the family of Count Széchényi,
