Le Ballon

Pal Szinyei Merse painted The Balloon in 1878, when a balloon rising over the countryside was still a rare and thrilling sight. He was fascinated by machines, and as a student had even tried to design a flying craft, so when his brother-in-law went up in a balloon the idea seized him at once. The little canvas shows the airship climbing into a huge, bright sky while a few small figures on the grass below crane up to watch it go. Szinyei painted light and open air years ahead of most Hungarian painters, and for a long time the public did not follow him. This sunlit picture comes from the brief burst of confident work he made in his early thirties, before he withdrew from painting for over a decade.