Simplifying the sensual ideal - a selection of paintings by Károly Ferenczy

On the Hilltop, 1901.

Boy at the Riverside, 1903.

Study for above.

Cross Hill Near Nagybánya, 1900.

Nagybánya, ND.

Landscape in Springtime with the Flower Hill, 1898.

Adam, 1894.

Autumn Hillside, circa 1900-05.

Chestnut Trees in Nagybánya, 1900.

Summer, 1902.

Study for above.

My Studio in Nagybánya, 1897.

Our House in Nagybánya on Petőfi Street, ND.

Wrestlers, 1912.

Landscape in Spring, 1905.

Landscape, 1909.

Acrobats, 1913.

Athletes, 1915.

Summertime, 1906.

The Edge of the Grove, 1907.

Nagybánya Landscape, ND.

Study for below.

Boys on the Beach, 1912.

Evening (?), 1912.

I'm totally captivated by how the artist, in these last three images - using only these incredibly simplified, even crude, figures - has so beautifully captured the particularity of the waning day, the changing light. One can almost feel the shifting into evening. The play of cool and warm reflected in the skin tones is just exquisite.

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Károly Ferenczy (February 8, 1862, Vienna – March 18, 1917, Budapest), Hungarian painter and leading member of the Nagybánya artists' colony, he is considered the "father of Hungarian impressionism and post-impressionism" and the "founder of modern Hungarian painting." Born into a Hungarian Jewish family in Austria, his mother died soon after he was born. He first studied law and completed a degree from the College of Economy, but his future wife - a painter, herself - encouraged him to study painting. He traveled to Italy and then went to study at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1887. Two years later, he and his wife settled in Hungary; they had three children, all of whom would become artists. In 1893 he took his young family to Munich, where they lived for the next three years while he studied with the Hungarian painter Simon Hollósy and the circle of young artists around him.Upon his return to Hungary, Ferenczy helped found the artists colony in 1896, and became one of its major figures. In 1906, he was offered a teaching position at the Hungarian Royal Drawing School, now the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, but he returned to Nagybánya in the summers to teach. The range of his subject matter was broad, with his style becoming more and more individual as time went on. In his later period, the "reconciliation of the abstract aesthetic ideal with sensual beauty became a central concern of his art."

Self-portrait, 1893.