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Woman Playing the Lute

1811 · Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, Budapest

genre

János Donát was a typical exponent of Viennese Academic painting, which exerted a profound influence on Hungarian art for a considerable period of time. He was already an elderly man when he moved to Hungary. Donáth became a friend of the writer Ferenc Kazinczy, a leading figure of the Hungarian Enlightenment, and it was his recommendations that opened the way for Donát to became one of the most popular portrait painters of the 1810s and 1820s, one of the great periods of portrait painting among the nobility and the higher circles of the bourgeoisie.

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Woman Playing the Lute

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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