LOTZ, Károly

Painting nudes was one of the favourite genres of K�roly Lotz, especially during the 1890s he painted several nudes. His female nudes are generally very sensuous, with natural beauty radiating from their gestures.

This picture is located on the ceiling of the upper hall on the first floor of the former Art Gallery (M�csarnok). The building was erected in 1875-77.

Painting nudes was one of the favourite genres of K�roly Lotz, especially during the 1890s he painted several nudes. His female nudes are generally very sensuous, with natural beauty radiating from their gestures. This particular nude is a little abstract; her posture, the cape over the shoulder, and the black stone vessel are reminiscent of the cool grace of Ingres’s nudes.

Towards the end of his career Lotz painted several elongated pictures portraying beautiful women. In this particular portrait he seated his model in front of a landscape, but the emphasis is on the depiction of the person rather than that of nature. The charming, youthful figure is dressed is white, she bolds a colourful bouquet of wild flowers in her hand. The general effect of the painting brings in mind the colours and ambiance of English portrait paintings at the end of the century.

On returning home from Vienna where he had studied, the young K�roly Lotz looked at the Hungarian landscape and people with a fresh eye. Indeed, his excellent observations were way ahead of his age. Although his paintings depicting the landscape of the Great Hungarian Plains during storm were still rooted in Romanticism, their emotional charge, variegated compositional methods and, most of all, their realistic colours justified Lotz’s personal ambitions. “Stud in a Thunderstorm”, painted in 1862, is an excellent example of these qualities. His depiction of the clouds whirling in the depth of the space, his felicitous rendering of the horses and his ability to capture the feeling and unique world of the people of the flatlands could not be matched by any of his contemporaries.

Lotz was also a renowned fresco painter; he was the first demonstrate in this lesser known genre in Hungary how an architect and a painter could work together in order to achieve a homogeneous work of art.

K�roly Lotz was an active and celebrated painter of second half of the last century. Many of his large murals can be found in the capital in public buildings (Opera House, National Museum), churches and private places. He studied in Vienna under Karl Rahl and his works show the effect of the great Renaissance masters, Raphael in particular. Most of his paintings are of mythological subjects, portraits or nudes, though in the early phase of his art he did some significant representations of native scenery such as the Great Hungarian Plain and the life of the peasants.

The setting sun hidden behind a cloud lights up the landscape of the plain, catching the shepherd and his herd in the foreground and the gleaming surface of the water. The bucolic atmosphere of landscape, the little cottage in the trees in the background and the silence of Nature preparing for rest give great intimacy to this painting by Lotz.