Queens Elisabeth and Mary at the Tomb of King Lajos the Great in 1385

historical

Besides a few visits to his home country, Sándor (Alexander) Liezen-Mayer, who was born in Gyr, Hungary, spent his entire life in Munich, where he was a much respected professor at the Academy. He painted this study as a young man in Karl Piloty's class in 1862. Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary at the Sarcophagus of Louis Anjou the Great of Hungary is a courageous, though avowedly theatrical composition built on the contrast between the splendid coronation ceremony of Small Charles of Durazzo, scene in the background, and graveness of the two queens vowing vengeance at the grave of King Louis the Great.

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Queens Elisabeth and Mary at the Tomb of King Lajos the Great in 1385

About the Artist

Sándor Liezen-mayer

1839 – 1898

Hungarian painter. He studied at Carl Rahl in Vienna and Munich in 1857 where he began painting romantic historic pictures in Piloty 's style. Due to his harmonic colouring and well-balanced composition, the illustrations for Goethe's Faust, Schiller's Bandits and Das Lied von der Glocke, brought him a lot of success. In 1870 he was invited to paint the portrait of Emperor Franz Josef in Vienna. After the years 1880-83, when he was the director of the Stuttgart Academy, he returned to Munich where he worked as a teacher in the art school. His major pictures: St. Elizabeth of Hungary (painted in two, almost identical versions), Queen Elisabeth Signs the Death Sentence of Mary Stuart, Venus and Tannhäuser, and Faust and Marguerite.

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