Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 105. (Budapest, 2006)

ANNUAL REPORT - A 2006. ÉV - ORSOLYA RADVÁNYI: The First Heyday of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest: Gábor Térey (1864-1927) Memorial Exhibition

huge popularity among Hungarian as well as foreign art collectors of the beginning of the twentieth century, and consequently it was possible to acquire important works also on the Hungarian art market. Térey did his utmost to be on good terms with the Hungarian art dealers and private collectors. Therefore, despite the war and financial difficulties, he consistently enriched the collection of the Old Masters' Gallery. It was thus due to his personal intercession that the collection numbering 180 pieces selected from the bequest of Count János Pálffy also entered the Old Masters' Gallery in 1912. It included such masterpieces as Boccaccio Boccaccino's altarpiece representing the Nativity and the Flemish panel with the story of saints Paul and Barnabas, which were also shown at the chamber exhibition. Térey's purchases and scholarly interests were closely interlinked. As a young scholar, he focused on fifteenth-century German painting, and as a chief curator, he managed to acquire several panels from this period. This section was represented at the exhibition by the Master of the Winkler-Epitaph, which has also recently been restored. He later turned his attention towards seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Flemish and Dutch painting, but he was especially interested in the re-discovery of forgotten œuvres. Throughout his career he was occupied wdth the outlining of the œuvre of two painters, the Dutch landscapist, Jan Siberechts, and the Hungarian Jakab Bogdány, who became a court painter to the king of England. He was planning to write a book on both painters, but this ambition was cut short by his sudden death. However, the paintings of both masters that Térey purchased can still be enjoyed even today. A revealing example of Gábor Térey's scholarly activities are his catalogues issued in five editions, in which he studied the material of the Old Masters' Gallery at the highest professional level by the standards of the beginning of the twentieth-century. Due to the continuous enrichment of the collection, Térey reorganised the exhibition on more than one occasion, and at the same time supplemented the catalogues with new data. Fortunately, some pages have survived of one of Térey's unpublished manuscripts which reflect the scholar's working method: he devoted decades to obtaining all the accessible information about a certain work of art. The extant examples of his correspondence attest to his friendships, as well as to his professional relationships with foreign scholars, art dealers and art collectors. Documents scattered all over the world testify to his relationship with the most outstanding scholars of the age such as Jakob Burckhardt, Wilhelm von Bode and Bernard Berenson. The words contained in these documents paint a full and revealing professional and human portrait of this Hungarian researcher to whom the book and the exhibition paid tribute on the occasion of the centenary of the opening of the museum. Orsolya Radványi