Mihály Munkácsy

Private collection, The Hague (acquired early 20th century, possibly in Paris);

Thence by descent to the present owner.

Painted at the height of Munkácsy's success as a painter of the beau monde in Paris, where he had settled in 1871, this painting depicts a group of ladies in elegant attire on a forest walk, negotiating a steep rocky path. In the background, one woman gives the other a helping hand on the descent. The narrative, however, is secondary to the grand forest setting. While Munkacsy at this stage in his career was responding to the tastes of his new bourgeois patrons – the result of entering into a ten-year contract with the upmarket Galerie Sedelmeyer in 1878 - he always remained true to the plein air aesthetic he loved and which he had adopted in the early 1870s while working in Barbizon. The present work is a case in point, the dappled light filtering though the tree tops and the materiality of the forest - made palpable by the thick application of paint - calling to mind the forest interiors of Gustave Courbet or László Paál. 

We are grateful to Dr Judit Boros for endorsing the attribution and suggesting a date to the 1870s.