Veszprémi Nóra - Jávor Anna - Advisory - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2005-2007. 25/10 (MNG Budapest 2008)

STUDIES - Zsuzsa FARKAS: Reproductions in a Sculptor's Estate from the 1870s: Anna Christ's Photographs of Ferenc Kugler's Statues

photography. Rather, on-the-spot photography of sculptures was regarded as belonging to taking shots of cityscapes, and was based on the methods of taking photographs of historical monuments. All this prompted me to introduce the reproductions in a lesserknown sculptural estate now in the possession of the National Gallery. My guiding thread in this endeavour was a highly important photo in the estate that depicts the environment of the artworks: the magical, 19

th-century world of the Beleznay Gardens and the photographic and the sculptural studios there. The specific field of studio architecture also became an emphatic element in my study, because the designs for the sculptural studio of Pál Ferenc Kugler (1836-1875) have happened to come down to us. The way I attempted to organize the data that 1 had collected on studios for the purposes of comparative analysis was by mentioning their sources only in the footnotes. In 1965, Gyula Soós published an excellent study on the Sopron-born sculptor Pál Ferenc Kugler in the journal Soproni Szemle.

2 The diligent scholar collected the artist's works, processed the data of his exhibitions and their press coverage of the period. On the basis of his researches, we know that Kugler had displayed five statues at the exhibitions of the Arts Association (Műegylet) between 1862 and 1865.

3 Soós had the opportunity of publishing only six reproductions, but did refer to the Kugler material held by the Sculpture Department of the National Gallery. (The data of the 13 statues in its stock are listed in the Appendix). He knew the Kugler documents in the Archive of the 2. János Tiedge: The Kugler Family, 1858. HNG Archive National Gallery and the collection of reproductions at the Sculpture Department, but made no use of them. (Though he was actually interested in photos: it was among the reproductions in the Storno Collection that he had chanced upon a photo of Kugler's plaster made for the Széchenyi statue competition.) All in all, we have over thirty "new" reproductions, which show at least fifty works, and, through their help, we can learn more about the whole oeuvre. 3. Anna Christ: The Photographer's Studio, c. 1870. HNG