Lot 79: László PaálHungarian, 1846-1879

signed Laszlo Paal l.r. oil on canvas

66 by 93cm., 26 by 36½in.

Béla Lázár, Ladislas de Paál. Un peintre hongrois de l'école de Barbizon, Paris, 1904, p. 111, fig. 48, illustrated
Bényi Lászlo, Paál László, 1983, no. 61, illustrated

Count Adolf Kohner (1866-1937), Budapest (with his inventory label no. K. 72 on the reverse; his sale: Ernst Museum, Budapest, 26-28 February, 1934, lot 193)
Purchased at the above sale by the family of the present owner; thence by descent

Major works by Paál rarely appear on the market. Many are in Hungary?s public collections, and those in private hands are few given that Paál died aged just thirty-three. The appearance of the present work, painted at the height of his career, marks an important rediscovery.

A descendant of an impoverished Hungarian aristocratic family, László de Paál studied landscape painting under Albert Zimmermann at the Vienna Academy. It was here that he met his lifelong friends Eugen Jettel (see lots 45 & 58), Emil Jakob Schindler and Mihály Munkácsy, whom he followed to Düsseldorf in 1871 and Paris in 1872. He was greatly influenced by the work of Courbet and the painters of the Barbizon School, which he had already encountered at the French exhibition in Munich in 1869. After he had settled in Paris, Paál spend six months of each year at Barbizon, painting the local scenery.

Paál?s career, cut short by his untimely death, reached its peak between 1875 and 1877. His works influenced not only Munkacsy, Jettel and Schindler, but also Max Liebermann and the Swedish expressionist Carl Frederic Hill. They appreciated his particular sense of drama, which was regarded as a Hungarian characteristic stemming from his emotional response to memories of home.

Although appreciated abroad as an individual and influential painter of the Barbizon School, in Hungary Paál was hardly known before an exhibition of his work held in 1902.