Gopcsa Katalin (szerk.): Egry (Budapest, 2005)

"Lake Balaton is poetry and reveries, history and tradition, a repository of bittersweet tales, the ancestral home of some unusual Hungarian folk; it is pride in the past and hope for the future," Károly Eötvös wrote in 1899 in his travelogue Tour Around Lake Balaton. A colorful account of a trip taken a quarter of a century earlier and first published in installments in the periodical Egyetértés, the book created a nationwide sensation comparable only to Lajos Kossuth's letters, published on the pages of Pesti Hirlap, which sang praises of the lake's beauty while lamenting its backward condition: "The beauty of Lake Balaton is visible at all times - when it is calm and changing colors here and there, as well as when the howling wind whips up a succession of waves. It is beautiful when it assumes an angry green hue to herald an approaching storm, but is at its most beautiful, unsurpassably so, when the first rays of the rising sun or the charmed beam of the full moon shoot across its rippling surface.

... Still, one's heart aches surveying this immense body of water, which is as desolate as the accursed Dead Sea must be in the Palestine. Its twenty leagues of smooth highway are longer than some counties, and some principalities even, and some of the most scenic regions of the land surround it, yet not a single boat floats upon it, save for the flatboats of Füred and one or two miserable fishing boats.... What curse oppresses our nation?" Kossuth's complaint was justified. True, the Reform Age discovered the lake and considered it thrilling, mysterious, worthy of contemplation and admiration - but for a long time it remained inaccessible to visitors, lacking taverns, inns or amenities for travelers who intended to sojourn there. There were no roads or railroad lines around it; only in 1910 was train travel from Budapest to Balatonfüred made possible. The first sign of new life was the building of the railway on the south shore in 1861, leading to the development of bathing spas in the 1890's. Roads were built in the 1920's. On the water, it was mostly different types of rafts and tubs, and a few sailboats. The first wooden paddle-wheel steamboat on Lake Balaton was the Kisfaludy, launched on September 21, 1846. The shepherds living near the shore were in the habit of driving their cattle into the water during the dog days, taking a dip themselves to rinse off their sweat. But the water was of real use only to fishermen and washerwomen; the other locals barely gave it a second thought. During the incipient period of early 19

th century Hungarian painting, at a time when the poets' ardent words were calling attention to the land around the Balaton, the first depictions of the region were chiefly faithful, life-like drawings of ruined fortresses. Later there followed a richer variety of subjects. Hungarian landscape painters trained at academies abroad produced works that ranked alongside the best. These artists were carried away by the intrinsic attractions of a scenery that suggested an unspoiled, paradisiacal existence, as well as by the compelling spectacle of ancient ruins and other traces of human presence. Painters came to pay homage to the uniqueness of the region that Ádám Horváth Pálóczi had dubbed "the Hungarian Sea". Their works followed the classical compositions of landscape painting, featuring shadowed foregrounds flanked by leafy boughs and "staffage", a middle ground with repoussoir figures to increase the effect of distance, and a background. Some painters were inspired by foaming waves whipped up by storms, others by the mirror-smooth surface of the waters; lakeside genre scenes were popular, redolent with local color, as were nature studies rendering the pantheistic aspects of primeval nature. The rich and varied world of Lake Balaton provided everyone with what he was looking for. It presented a panorama for traditional landscape art as well as scenes of the nascent tourism and spa life that was becoming fashionable just then. Among the first artists to depict the Balaton was General Petrich, who drew sketches of the lake and its shoreline, and who was followed by better known artists such as Sándor (Alexander) Brodszky, Antal Ligeti, Gusztáv Keleti, Károly Telepy, József Molnár, and Géza Mészöly, who called attention to hitherto unknown beauties of the lake. New notes were struck by the Balaton paintings of Pál Merse Szinyei, István Csók, and Aurél Bernáth. The attractions of the lake were appreciated by László Mednyánszky, and celebrated in lively pastels by József Rippl-Rónai. János Vaszary and Béla Iványi Grünwald, who