Sándor Brodszky

Early Evening Landscape, dated 1850, belongs to the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava, the city that was then called Pressburg, where Sándor Brodszky had gone to school at the Lutheran lyceum. By 1850 he was living in Munich, the German city where many Central European landscape painters trained. He had reached painting by a roundabout path. Born in 1819 in Tóalmás, a village in Pest County, he studied medicine at the university of Pest for four years and left before taking his degree to learn landscape painting in Vienna. In Munich his romantic views won the support of the Bavarian art society, and he contributed a sheet to the album of King Ludwig I.

After 11 years there he came home in 1856 and settled in Pest. His first large commission was a view of Margaret Island in the Danube, painted for the royal court. In the 1870s the Hungarian state ordered two large landscapes from him for the National Museum, and one of them, a view of Lake Balaton, now hangs in the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest.