János Nagy Balogh

1874 – 1919

Hungarian painter. He came from a working class family. After working as a house-painter, he studied at the School of Industrial Trade Drawing in Budapest for two years, and attended an evening course of the School of Design in 1898-99. He was a pupil of Hertenich at the Munich Academy for six months where he painted models posing in the nude, but his bad financial situation forced him to return to Hungary where he did odd jobs as a house-painter and painted pictures in summers only. He joined the army in 1915. After a serious injury, his arm became paralyzed, so that he went on painting with his left arm. His first works show the influence of Munich genre-painting and the symbolism of art-nouveau at the turn of the century, later he developed his own style: dramatic expressiveness, yet touchingly simple and authentic compositions. In his works, the periods before 1908 and after 1915, when he joined the army, are clearly distinct. After his injury, he painted very few pictures. His subject matters are rather limited, but variations of the same theme demonstrate the development of his creativity and composition. He painted pictures of his poorly home with appalling realism and dramatic portraits of his mother. His navvy-cycle recalling Millet's pictures portrays work in a simple, yet monumental way. Beside Rembrandt 's and Frans Hals's art, he was influenced by Cézanne 's approach to space.

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