River Landscape August von Pettenkofen

The discovery in the mid-nineteenth century of the Great Hungarian Plain by Austrian painters, including August von Pettenkofen, was no accident: having tired of the con straints of academicism, they turned towards nature. For them, the Hungarian plains were already part of the “exotic east”, and the lights and impressions of the Great Plain landscape made the town of Szolnok even more attractive in their eyes, a location which became easily accessible with the construction of the railway. Their art and choice of subject were also significantly influenced by French landscape painting and the Barbizon school. Pettenkofen also visited both Paris and Barbizon; the pictures he created there may also be considered ethnographic recordings. His work entitled „River Landscape”, painted in the early 1850s, is based on the contrast between the lonely figure of an angler and the endless Hungarian lowlands surrounding him. The view of the spacious horizon of the river bank is interrupted only by a towering tree. The swampy landscape depicted in the painting is also special because this natural environment on the banks of the Tisza, a diverse source of inspiration for artists at the time, disappeared permanently with the river regulations of the 1870s.

Bianka Izsák-Boda