We Belong Together. Hungary before Trianon in drawings

This special chamber exhibition titled We Belong Together showcases a selection of the most beautiful drawings produced by Hungarian illustrators arranged according to themes and regions. The displayed works include Róbert Nádler’s drawing Promenade in Buda with the Buildings of the Castle Garden with a contemporaneous illustration of the Castle Garden Bazaar, Gyula Háry’s drawings of the streets and the dome of Kassa (Kosice) and Rozsnyó, and László Mednyánszky’s work of Kiskunfélegyháza and its surroundings.  

The monumental publication was realised upon the initiative of Archduke Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria with the aim of providing a comprehensive introduction to the peoples of the Monarchy. In accordance with Rudolf’s wishes, the publication came out in two languages, with one editorial office in Vienna and one in Budapest, where the work was directed by Mór Jókai. In the same way, two separate printers were set up to produce the illustrations.

The booklets, which are also known as the “crown prince’s work” (Kronprinzenwerk) were published biweekly between 1885 and 1902. They were later organised into volumes by regions, which is how posterity came to know them. The last three volumes, which were published in Vienna, did not have Hungarian counterparts.

In the nineteenth century encyclopaedic publications with an ethnographic theme were popular. Rudolf sought to model his series on this kind of content, while the concept also reflected his political views: he wanted to have each of the nationalities that made up the huge conglomerate of the Monarchy to be regarded as of equal rank through their comprehensive historical, economic, ethnographic and cultural presentation. To facilitate this, he involved the most well-known scholars of the period in writing the texts and invited almost every artist of Austrian, Hungarian and other nationalities of the period to participate in making the illustrations.

The commissioning of the illustrations as well as selecting and evaluating them were dealt with by a separate editorial committee in both Vienna and Budapest. The president of the Hungarian committee was painter Gusztáv Keleti. A great many prominent artists of the period participated in producing the drawings, numbering in excess of 1,600 on the Hungarian side, including Miklós Barabás, Mihály Zichy, Gyula Benczúr, Lajos Deák-Ébner, Árpád Feszty, Jenő Gyárfás, Bertalan Székely, Béla Spányi and Sándor Wagner, to name just a few. The commissions were not distributed evenly, which can be attributed to the effort to contract as many big names as possible, even if it meant just a few drawings from each artist. In addition to this, it was not only the most well-known artists of the last two decades of the nineteenth century who were invited to contribute but also reliable masters as well as those with outstanding skills of draughtsmanship who were not counted among the foremost artists of the period as painters but were nonetheless regarded as professional illustrators working for the prestigious representative albums of the period, such as Gyula Háry, Tivadar Dörre, Lajos Rauscher and Róbert Nádler. In line with the original concept, the illustrations in The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Picture, which were bereft of romantic sentiments, complemented the texts at equal rank to them. The drawings include reproductive copies of sculptural works, archaeological finds and portraits of rulers, although the majority of them were landscapes, genre-like compositions of folk customs and portraits depicting folk costumes, whose quality is on a par with art drawings. In their capacity as drawings these works provide a representative and comprehensive overview of the art of drawing in the last two decades or so of the nineteenth century. Despite the fact that the artists of these drawings were limited to an extremely narrow scope of techniques – drawing in black and white, in ink, pen or at best in sepia – their works demonstrate the greatest diversity of the drawing of the period in regard to their themes, stylistic tendencies and compositional patterns.

After lengthy consideration, the woodcutting method known as xylography was selected for the reproduction of the 4,500 or so illustrations instead of photography, which at the time was extremely expensive and technically not yet suitable for achieving the appropriate standards. In 1902 the illustrations and the blocks used for the prints in The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Picture came into the possession of the Viennese imperial and royal and the Hungarian royal state printing presses since Rudolf conferred the proprietary rights of the entire publication i.e., “both the intellectual content and the prints” to the printers. The drawings in the volumes that were not produced in the Hungarian editorial office can be found in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung, although nothing is known about the printing blocks. Action was taken in 1902 in regard to the drawings that appeared in the Hungarian volumes: the printers handed over the drawings, numbering over 1,600, to the Museum of Fine Arts, where they were placed in the collection of the Department of Prints and Drawings and that of the Historical Portrait Gallery. The drawings are now with the legal successors of these collections, while the Hungarian printing blocks can be found in the Hungarian National Museum.

Curator of the exhibition: Orsolya Hessky