Japanese Woman

Japan had been largely closed to the West until the 1850s, and once its prints and lacquer and porcelain reached Europe, painters everywhere caught the fascination. It arrived in Budapest through an exhibition of East Asian objects at the Hungarian National Museum in 1870. Bertalan Szekely went, was captivated, and the next year painted this, the first Hungarian picture to take Japan as its subject. The woman is a European model dressed and staged with real Japanese things he had seen in the show, a folding mirror stand at her feet, a comb in her hand, a painted screen behind her. Szekely was better known at home for large scenes from Hungarian history, and he returned to those soon after. This single Japanese subject stayed a rare experiment in his work.