Markó és az időrend. Észrevételek id. Markó Károly munkásságához

Abstract

It appears a hopeless endeavour to create the catalogue raisonnée of Károly Markó the Elder's oeuvre, but the effort must not be given up. We are still a long way away from knowing the whole oeuvre, as it is very hard to set the works in chronological order. Clues are to be gleaned from the oeuvre, first of all the works that were shown in the Vienna and Pest exhibitions and are already identified. Several pictures of the early, little known years exhibited in the showings of the Akademie der Bildenden Künste between 1826 and 1848 have been found recently and shed new light on the oeuvre. In the exhibition of the Pest Art Society the whole Markó family was involved, the identified paintings providing important information not only of the family but also of the Hungarian art life in general. In the appendix I list the items gleaned from the Viennese catalogues followed by the entire stock of the Pest exhibition. The two sets of data are a great addition to the future catalogue raisonnée and complement Mrs Gábor Ö. Pogány's first catalogue of works published in 1957. The study discusses the emblematic Visegrád painting from the point of view of dating. Early in his career Markó depicted several castles the best known of which are the gouache adaptations of Josef Fischer's series. During his stay in Pest Markó changed over to oil, and I presume that Visegrád is a next step from the watercolour cycle of castles, as one of the first pieces – if not the very first piece – of his changing to oil painting in the 1820s. It was also dated to this period in the 2011 exhibition and catalogue (Károly Markó and His Circle. From Myth to Image). Finally, I try to clarify the circumstances of the genesis of another set of Markó paintings, those of the Great Plain, by arranging them into strict chronological order.