Gosztonyi Ferenc - Király Erzsébet - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2002-2004. 24/9 (MNG Budapest, 2005)

STUDIES - Shinji Tanaka: On Bertalan Székely's Japanese Woman, 1871

Bertalan Székely: Japanese Woman, 1871. Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest Lajos (Ludwig) Hevesi, the author of the article on Japanese Woman in Pester Lloyd, wrote a novel of adventure woven around the character of András Jelky

15 (1741-1786), who, as a Dutch envoy, was probably the second Hungarian to ever set foot on Japanese ground.'

6 The autobiography of Maurice Benyowsky (1741-1786), who, fleeing from Russian captivity, sought asylum in Japan in 1771, was translated into Hungarian by the celebrated writer Mór Jókai.

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The 1873 World's Fair in Vienna was instrumental in popularizing Japanese arts and crafts in the territory of the Dual Monarchy, and it was on this occasion that the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest purchased Japanese handicrafts.

18 On 1 September 1880, the Országos Iparegyesület (Hungarian Industrial Association) opened a show of applied arts from the Far East, including Japan.'" Japanese objects appear in paintings from the 1880s. The picture Lady with Camellia painted by Gyula Tornai (1860-1928) in 1886, featured a Japanesque pattern with birds in the background. In Lady Playing with Angora Cats a painting done in the same year by Géza Vastagh (1866-1919), a Japanese fan (uchiwa) can be seen on the top of a cabinet. In Tihamér Margitay's (1859-1922) ^ Good Match from 1887 a Japanese folding screen appears. In György Vastagh's (1834-1922) Group of Children from 1887, one of the children depicted was holding a Japanese (?) umbrella.'" In the painting entitled Red-Haired Lady Tuning Her Mandolin by Bertalan Karlovszky (1858-1938), a Japanese woodblock print can be seen in the background.

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' We do not yet possess a clear understanding of the extent to which the contemporary Hungarian public and artists were attracted to things Japanese. It seems, however, that this attraction was weaker and of a later date than that in Western Europe. It was only from the 1900s onward that the fad of Japonisme spread widely in Hungary.

22 THE JAPANESE WOMAN AND THE XÁNTUS COLLECTION What might have motivated the artist in 1871 to paint the Japanese Woman? In the aforementioned article by Hevesi, he suggests that Székely might have studied Japanese objects in the Xántus collection: 'many details bear evidence of his having meticulously studied the original Japanese objects collected by Xántus or brought back to Hungary by Baron Ivor Kaas, a participant in