A Hajdú-Bihar Megyei Levéltár évkönyve 28. 2001 (Debrecen, 2001)
Tanulmányok - Dunka Sándor: Az építészet és a rajz oktatása Debrecenben a XIX. sz. első felében. Beregszászi Pál munkássága
58 Dunka Sándor: Az építészet és rajz oktatása Debrecenben... THE TEACHING OF ARCHITECTURE AND DRAWING IN DEBRECEN IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 19™ CENTURY: THE WORK OF PÁL BEREGSZÁSZI Sándor Dunka After several centuries of flourishing, Hungarian industry began a period of decline in the late 18th century. “Masters” without the necessary sense of vocation and skills of the trade entered the guild-based industry in great numbers, deteriorating the quality of standards in the industries. The ruler, as early as 1786, recognising the dangers inherent with this situation, ordered local authorities to set up Sunday drawing school connected with the national schools in order to train the apprentices employed in the industry. Despite the fact that this decree was later repeated in 1795 by the Governing Council, due to the reluctance of the masters, the remissness of the apprentices, and the shortage of appropriate teachers, these school were not available on a nation-wide basis. At the same time, as early as the first years of the 19th century, architecture and drawing were taught in the Reformed College of Debrecen, which created an opportunity for the extension of the education and eventually the founding of the municipal “Drawing School.” The drawing school of Debrecen opened its doors in 1813. In addition to the municipal will and the support of the College, the main reason why it did not suffer a fate similar to other institutions of the same kind was the fact that in 1819 an excellent engineer and pedagogue, imbued by the ideas of the Reform Age, became the principal of the school, and served it in this capacity with a high level of technical and pedagogical standard for nearly four full decades until his retirement in 1858. He, too, had to fight his battles with the indifference of the masters, the negligence of the apprentices, but his honesty and discipline, in the best sense of this word, finally made the school under his leadership of the country's best of its time in the mid- 19th century. He also helped the preparation of his pupils by writing some excellent schoolbooks on architecture, free hand and scenographich drawing. He also made the illustrations for his Hungarian books, and engraved them in copperplate at a high, artistic level. In these early masterpieces of Hungarian technical literature, his translations of foreign expressions became a part of the technical vocabulary even for contemporary usage. Upon his retirement, Beregszászi handed over a well-organised and continuously operating school to his successors, which existed until 1877, the year when trade education started in an institutionalised way. Even though in its more than six decades of existence the drawing school did not give to the country any artists of outstanding talent, but it did educate a number of excellent masters, and especially many joiners who subsequently created countless pieces of fine workmanship of industrial art quality. The excellence of the
