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

By then he had his first one-man exhibition behind him, held in the showroom of the Belvedere on the mezzanine of n/b Váci utca. By the mid-i930s he had become a recognised painter: his canvases were exhibited by the New Society of Artists and Imre Artinger had written a concise monograph on his art. When he was fifty in 1933, a retrospective exhibition of his works was opened in the Tamás Gallery.

His views of Balaton were painted at Keszthely and then at Badacsony. Having fallen ill as a soldier in World War I (1915-16), he was taken to the auxiliary hospital at Badacsony, where he met Juliska Paulen For Egry's sake, the young woman divorced her husband, a high-ranking army officer, and married the "drunken painter" at the outrage of her family and fashionable friends in 1918. Egry had done little to deserve the unflattering appellation: "in all the time I spent in his company, I had never even seen him tipsy; while others drank, he just sipped at his wine at most," remembered Dezső Keresztury.

Among the most perceptive critics of his work were Ernő Kállai, Máriusz Rabinovszky, and István Genthon, whose favourable reviews were published regularly; and yet, financial ease was not to be enjoyed by Egry, to whom the years of war brought downright poverty. "Every day 1 look into my studio: unheated for weeks now, it is unfitted for any kind of work,” he complained. It was Egry himself who best summed up the essence of his art: ”1 have learned the language of nature, which only her fanatic admirers can understand [...] in order to get to myself. I have discovered that atmospheric light plays such a dominant part that it changes, it transforms everything, and that objects in it are transposed by motion and assume a new form..."

His importance was gradually recognized after his death. In 1954 a street was named for him in 1954; in it, at No. 3-11, was placed a memorial plaque with his portrait sculpted by Miklós Borsos in 1962. His exhibition held in 1966 in Tihany was a great success, and in 1973 a museum was opened in his former house in Badacsony.

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