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
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