Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2007)

ISTVÁN NÉMETH: Vanishing Hopes: The Last Will of Marcell Nemes - The Museum of Fine Arts' Acquisitions from the Nemes Estate

in the end only insisted on the acquisition of five modern Hungarian pictures that he deemed to be the most important. Petrovics suspected that in the given situation that had developed he would not achieve results merely by recourse to the collector's last will and so he tried a different approach. He argued that the museum had been the custodian of Marcell Nemes's collection of modern Hungarian paintings, which exceeded two hundred pieces, for some fourteen years without exacting a fee, thus the executors of the estate had saved a considerable sum after Nemes's death which they would have had to pay for placing the collection elsewhere. The museum director stressed that the reason no expenses had thus far been calculated for the safekeeping of the paintings was because Nemes had made it clear several times that after his death a substantial donation would be made to the museum from his estate and he also had this intention expressed in his last will. To resolve the situation Petrovics made the following proposal: the executive committee for the estate would allow the museum to select some valuable works from the Hungarian material in the Nemes estate as a collateral for the aforementioned service the estimated cost of which was put at 28,000 pengős, and in return the institution would be willing to definitively forgo its claim to the other paintings that were originally bequeathed to it.

24 Every concerned party found this compromise solution to be an acceptable one and the agreement with the executors of the will and the creditors came into being in 1933. In the framework of this arrangement the museum finally managed to acquire the following five pictures by right of refunding of costs: two of the originally three selected works by Pál Szinyei Merse: The Swing (fig. 2) and Sleeping Woman (fig. 3), Munkácsy's Window Niche (fig. 4), József Rippl-Rónai's painting Uncle Piacsek with Dolls (fig. 5), and Géza Dósa's Double Portrait (fig. 6).

25 The acquisition of these paintings represented a significant augmentation of the museum's collection even though the number of works that had come into the possession of the institution in such a way were only a third of the amount that Marcell Nemes had left the Museum of Fine Arts in his will. However, given the circumstances there was probably little hope ol acquiring any more than this. In tandem with the aforementioned acquisitions several more paintings from the former Nemes Collection nevertheless came into the museum's possession through purchase and donation. The Museum of Fine Arts purchased a signed work by Gustave Courbet painted in 1872 entitled Rocky Landscape

26 in the first auction of the estate held in Munich in 1931 with the substantial financial support of Hungarian friends of art Emil Delmár, Simon Meiler, Richárd Tószeghy and Ernő Wittmann (fig. 7).

27 The acquisition of the picture was justified by the fact that at the time there was no other work in the museum's collection by the famous French painter.

28 It is possible that through the purchase Petrovics to a certain degree sought to com-