Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák

A More Nuanced Portrait

The Bicentennial of the Birth of Miklós Barabás (1810–1898)

 

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Barabás' lack of formal training may have contributed to his interest in experimenting with certain techniques and mediums. What seems to have offset this propensity was the sheer fact that by the age of thirty he was the most sought-after portraitist in Pest-Buda, and as such, his career was largely determined by the market and his commissions. Two of the surviving notebooks testify that long after having established his career he remained curious about new techniques and materials, as well as theories concerning the fine arts, into which he delved as part of the research he did for a lecture on perspective delivered at the age of forty-nine at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. These notebooks shed light on how he acquired this knowledge. He would take notes gleaned from instruction manuals in various languages, write down the methods he himself had tried and tested, and record observations made on the basis of works by other painters. The table of contents at the back indicates that he made frequent use of these notebooks, looking up and reminding himself how certain results were achieved. The order of the instructions suggests that they were haphazardly jotted down, skipping between various techniques and genres and other tasks, such as making paint or priming a canvas. It is very different from the well-structured education a painter who received formal training would have had. These directions are interspersed with titles of art historical publications, showing that parallel to perfecting his painting techniques he was also educating himself to be a master enlightened on questions of contemporary theory.
Bypassing academic training (if perhaps not deliberately), Barabás was able to try his hand at less conventional genres, such as the series of preliminary drawings for an 1832 panorama showing a 360-degree view of the city of Bucharest. His attempt at a panorama predated by several decades experiments with this genre by any other Hungarian painter. In the foreground of the sheet numbered 1, which came closer to completion than the others in that it was painted in watercolours, one sees a scene with a Romanian Boyar and a high-ranking soldier, which is most likely a reference to a peace treaty. All the other sheets show numerous signs of the use of a camera obscura. Fainter lines, curved presumably as a result of the surface of the lens, have later been 'straightened' with a darker line. Furthermore each sheet of paper has border frames that were drawn later and that therefore cut off some of the details, details that were sketched again on the adjacent sheets. The succession of wide-angled documentary-like 'shots,' the equal shade and width of all the lines and the lack of any compositional work all attest to the use of an optical aid.

Miklós Barabás: Self-portrait, 1862. Oil on canvas, 122 x 92 cm
Private collection

Miklós Barabás: The Barabás Villa in the Városmajor, 1853. Watercolour, paper, 27 x 36.65 cm
Budapest History Museum

Portrait miniatures occupy a place of particular significance in Barabás' oeuvre. As a youth in his late teens, well before he had begun to acquaint himself with the techniques of oil painting, Barabás painted miniatures using slight, delicate brushstrokes. Indeed his first commissions were for portrait miniatures in the Transylvanian towns of Nagyenyed (Aiud, Romania) and Nagyszeben (Sibiu, Romania). However, the 1842 portrait of his wife from 1842, painted some fifteen years later, shows an entirely different approach to miniature portrait painting. Depicting her seated on a balcony with the sky and tree foliage in the background, the portrayal's composition reminds of portraits much larger in scale. In addition to the change in composition (swapping the neutral background for an actual environment), the 1842 piece also demonstrates a change in technique. Exploiting the reflective property of the ivory, Barabás scratches the painted surface and even leaves the base of his portrayal unpainted in certain areas, taking advantage of the light, diaphanous glow to render the depiction more vivid.
Even his foray into the genre of photography was more than a mere short-lived venture motivated by commercial interests. The latter of the two surviving notebooks contains the details concerning the chemical admixtures he concocted for use in the process of development.

Miklós Barabás: The Barabás Villa in the Városmajor, 1864. Albumin, 11 x 14 cm
Private collection

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Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák
is currently completing her doctoral thesis on Miklós Barabás at
the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.