Bust of Károly Markó Hans Gasser

Hans Gasser began his career as a maker of woodcuts, but he became increasingly popular as a sculptor in Vienna, Pest, and Munich in the 1840s. Besides his public statues, he also created busts of numerous significant fellow artists and well-known personages of his time. Gasser modelled his portrait of Károly Markó the Elder, the founder of Hungarian landscape painting, during the latter’s visit to Vienna in 1853. The painter was well established and highly esteemed by this time, and the bust was made according to the traditions of classical sculpture, although Gasser avoided idealisation by emphasising Markó’s distinctive facial features. The marble portrait was displayed to the public in Pest in 1855, but it was not until 1864, four years after the painter’s death, that it was bought by Emperor Franz Joseph I as a gift for the Hungarian National Museum, where it was exhibited in the same rooms as Markó’s emblematic landscapes. Now, after so many decades, they are once again together in the same building.