Szatmári Gizella: Signs of Remembrance - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)

of the English aristocracy. He intended to purchase a collection of Indian art objects from the East India Company. A woodcut reproduction of his "colossal painting” of the royal court in Lahore was published by the Paris magazine Illustration. In Mexico, he worked in Emperor Maximilian’s court. He painted huge, impressive canvases influenced by the style of the Munich school. From the mid-i86os, his career began to wane: his mounting financial difficulties, probably caused by his extravagance, forced him to sell his collection of works by Veronese, Titian, Tintoretto, Velasquez and Cranach. He ended his penurious existence in a mental institution. His daughter Borbála, who was also a painter, first exhibited her works in the early 1840s. Her marriage with Lénárd Landau, an instructor of the Pest School of Drawing, connected the lives of two outstanding families of Pest painters.

The house at No. 11 Képíró utca, a street whose name is under official protection, bears a crumbling, weather-beaten plaque, honouring the memory of the Schöfft family of painters..

The Most Glorious Hungarian

Several plaques and statues and even the name of what is perhaps the busiest street in the inner city honour the memory of Lajos Kossuth in Budapest. However, the weathered slab (made by Ernő Jálics in 1967) slightly protruding from the plane of the corner-building at 2 Kossuth Lajos utca bears the wrong date. In 1892 the "recluse of Turin” was awarded honorary citizenship of Budapest, while the naming of the street for Kossuth occurred two years later, in 1894, following his death. The capital city considerably rose in esteem and significance due to the activities of Kossuth as the delegate representing the city at the National Diet. It was here that Pesti Hírlap (Pest Courier) was first published on 29 December 1840 by the politician released from prison before he had served his four year sentence handed down for the "treasonous” publication of the banned Reports (írom the Diet. Kossuth was only able to continue editing his new paper and thus inform the public of his reform ideas and revolutionary aspirations for three years and a half because "secret and higher powers conspired," as Vasárnapi Újság explained, "to wring from Kossuth's hands the major tool of wielding his influence", i.e. his popular newspaper.

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