One of the most important personalities who worked in our vicinity was the painter Pavol Szinyei Merse, who was born on 4 July 1845 in Chminianská Nová Ves as the third of eight siblings in a noble family. 

His mother Valéria, born Jekelfalussy, was already very well educated artistically and she instilled this in her son from an early age. He received his artistic education by studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. His most important work, „Breakfast in Nature“, was misunderstood by his contemporaries and caused a scandal. He offered it free of charge to the National Museum in Budapest, which refused it. Therefore, Merse retired into seclusion and stopped painting for a while. He lived the life of a Hungarian nobleman, sitting in the Hungarian Parliament, where he worked to modernise education. With short interruptions, he lived his whole life on a large estate in Jarovnice in Šariš.

The balm for his psychological trauma from the misunderstanding of his work was the company of his wife Žofie Probstner. However, she eventually left him for love with Imrich Ghilányi, who took her to the Fričovce manor.

The dominant theme of his work was nature and the people of our region. However, it was very difficult for him to get models to paint, because there was a superstition among the villagers that whoever he painted would soon die. He enjoyed success in Paris, Munich, Berlin and friends persuaded him to exhibit Breakfast again in Budapest, where the public received it with enthusiasm. In 1905 he was appointed director of the Fine Arts College in Budapest. In addition to his landscape paintings, Szinyei also painted the altarpiece of St. John the Hermit located in the church in Jarovnice and his only self-portrait of a country householder in a leather coat, the only copy of which hangs in the Fričovce manor house. The author of this painting is the academic painter Štefan Filep. The original adorns one of the halls of the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence. 

Paul Szinyei Merse dies on 20 February 1920 in the arms of his daughter in Jarovnice. His former wife Žofia lived to be 101 years old.

Source: https://ovcie.info/2014/08/18/pavol-szinyei-merse/
Photo source: CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=223899

He was born on 25 May 1782 in the family of a carpenter from Levoca. Before studying at the university he preferred painting. From the famous painter Stunder, he received valuable lessons in the field of portraits of celebrities, as well as help with his first commissions from the Csáky family and the Prešov merchant Steinhübel. 

During the stay of Tsar Alexander I in Bardejov Spa he met Count Iljinsky, who invited him to his estate. In 1805 he travelled to St Petersburg, where he spent 19 years as a painter of portraits of the nobility, intelligentsia and people from high military and political circles. He was a member of the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. 

In 1817 he married Amalia Bauman, with whom he settled in 1825 in Prešov, where his brothers lived. Here Rombauer painted many realistic portraits of the nobility of Spiš and Šariš and the townspeople of Prešov. In addition to portraits, he also created several religious works for churches in eastern Slovakia and free compositions. His stay in Prešov is commemorated by the oil painting Unbelieving Tomáš in the Evangelical Church of the Holy Trinity, the painting of the electoral coachmen, the veduta View of Prešov or the ceiling painting Amor a Psyché in the house on Hlavná 16. Many of his works are currently in the collections of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava and the Šariš Gallery in Prešov. He lived in Prešov until the end of his life on 12 February 1849. He is buried in the local cemetery.

Source: Regional Library P. O. Hviezdoslav in Prešov; Micro-project. Prešov: Šarišská galéria, 2010.
Photo source: By Janos Rombauer (1782-1849) - Napoleon & Revolution, Free Work, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77726326