Portrait of János Bihari, Composer and Gipsy Virtuoso

1820 · Historical Picture Gallery, Hungarian National Museum, Budapest

portrait

János Bihari was a a self-taught Gipsy musician in Hungary. He formed his well-known band around 1801 the Pest, poured popular and ancient Hungarian melodies into in framework of the "verbunkos". The sources of the verbunkos, not yet comopletely known, include some of the traditions of the old Hungarian popular music, certain Levantine, Balkan and Slav elements, probably through the intermediation of the Gipsies, and also elements of the Viennese-Italian music, coming from the first cultivators of the verbunkos, the urban musicians of German culture.

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Portrait of János Bihari, Composer and Gipsy Virtuoso

About the Artist

János Donát

1744 – 1830

Hungarian painter. He learnt to paint at M. Meytens, V. Fischer and Sambach in Prague and Vienna. First he lived in Vienna and painted portraits. He moved to Pest in 1810 and painted some remarkable classicist portraits, e.g. Ferenc Kazinczy (1812) and Benedek Virág (1815). His mythological compositions (Resting Venus, Orpheus and Euridike, and Proserpina) after English copper engravings and altar-pieces were mostly inferior to his portraits.

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