His realistic images

The volume presents the works of the painter, lithographer, and even writer Miklós Barabás (1810-1898) at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. More than a catalogue: it is a review of his paintings, lithographs, and autobiography preserved at the Academy from a new perspective, and as such, an attempt to rethink the interpretative frameworks of his oeuvre and to reassess it historiographically. Even his contemporaries pointed out that Barabás' portraits gave a "faithful" but often idealized image of the clients, and even of the era in which they lived: the period of becoming a nation. The volume and its studies and catalogue entries examine precisely this often-mentioned and later often-criticized "fidelity": what this consisted of for the artist and the recipients of the time. To this end, they invoke a classical, but still decisive art theory doctrine in the 19th century: verisimilitude, or the principle of the realistic. Knowing this, the hitherto undifferentiated "realism" of Barabás's painted, drawn and written works can be nuanced, its layers can be separated; the way in which the artist carefully created and even constructed the believability of his works that is striking to the observer (or reader) can be formulated. This point of view also makes it possible to see Barabás not as a portraitist moving within narrow aesthetic and national boundaries, but to rediscover him as an artist who consciously applied the principle of the realistic, experimented with it, and was sophisticated and demanding in terms of his visual language.