FERENCZY, Károly

Hungarian painter. It was not before completing his law studies and graduating from the College of Economy that Ferenczy took up painting, primarily as a result of his future wife's influence. After travelling in Italy, he began studying at the Julian Academy in Paris in 1887. In 1889 be moved to Szentendre, a small town near Budapest, and painted in naturalistic style showing the influence of Bastien-Lepage.

Between 1893 and 1896 he lived in Munich with his family. There he joined the circle of Simon Hollósy with whom he moved to Nagybánya in 1896 and became the leading figure of the artist colony established in that small Transylvanian town. Of the Nagybánya painters representing plein-air paintingGLOSSARYIn contrast to painting in an atelier, this painting is done outdoors, under the sky, with the intention of realistically reproducing the natural features of a landscape, its atmosphere, and changes in light. Following the example set by English landscape painters such as Constable and Bonington, French painters, including members of the Barbizon School, began painting their pictures outdoors in the mid-19th century. The Impressionists made plein-air painting a fundamental principle of their painting., he was the first to have great success in 1903, when his paintings were exhibited in Budapest.

After 1906 he moved to Budapest and became a professor a the School of Drawing the predecessor of the College of Fine Arts, spending only the summers at Nagybánya. During his last creative period he mostly painted decorative pictures of nudes.

Ferenczy had three children, his son Valér (1885-1954), painter and graphic artist, and the twins Béni (1890-1967), painter and graphic artist and Noémi (1890-1957), a painter who established tapestryGLOSSARYAs historical climatologists have not shown that Renaissance Italian winters and springs were warmer than they are now, it is puzzling that Italy did not fabricate tapestries to decorate and draught-proof the stony rooms of its palaces until 1545, when Cosimo I set up a manufactory in Florence. To hardiness or stinginess (tapestry was by far the most expensive form of wall decoration) we owe the existence of such secular frescoed decorative schemes as the labours of the months in the castle at Trent (c. 1407), the Arthurian scenes of Pisanello and the courtly ones of Mantegna in the Ducal Palace of Mantua, the delicious calendar fantasies of Cossa and others in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara - and, doubtless, many others that await liberation from whitewash or later panelling. These are all in situations where northern patrons would have used tapestries. These were imported, chiefly from Flanders, into Italy. The influence of their hunting and ceremonial scenes in particular registered on Italian 'gothic' painting or illumination and stained glass, and in literature. But the Italians did not make them. The most famous of all 'Italian' tapestries, those for the Sistine Chapel designed by Raphael, were made in Brussels from the full-scale coloured patterns, or cartoons, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Nor is it clear whether imported tapestries were used habitually or simply to add grandeur to special occasions. Even when Cosimo's manufactory was in being, and working from designs by court artists of the calibre of Bronzino, Salviati and Allori, his own headquarters, the Palace of the Signoria (now the Palazzo Vecchio), was being decorated with frescoes. The subject is underexplored. in Hungary.