FERENCZY, Károly
(b. 1862, Wien, d. 1917, Budapest)

Evening in March

1902
Oil on canvas, 116,5 x 141,5 cm
Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, Budapest

"An Evening in March" portrays landscape in a realistic fashion. Yet Ferenczy's picture contains more than meets the eye: it is not only orthodox churches and white stone-walls, but the peaceful atmosphere of a town in sunshine, nature preparing for spring, the fragrence of cool air and the azure of the sky in Nagybánya: a late afternoon in May. It is surprisingly new what takes place in this picture: this is the very moment when sunshine appears in Ferenczy's painting, it is not sunshine glimmering through leaves but warm brightness flooding the picture. The twilight makes everything, stone-walls, trees, people and animals more colourful. There are long dark shadows stretching only along the earth in the foreground and the silhouettes of carriages are sharply projected on the white stone-wall as if figures of a shadow theatre. Ferenczy again composed a picture: the long stone-wall and the Fekete-hill behind it make up a long horizontal strip which runs along the picture-plane in the middle of it. The old birch tree on the left and the vertical form of the church tower make them a solid composition.

This composition consists of light and shadow besides forms and lines. The boundary of the horizontal line in the middle is drawn by light and shadow. The dark, shadowy foreground finds its counterpoint in colour and form in the bright sky. The monotony of the stone-wall is broken by carriages and their shadows. The counterpoint of the church and the church tower can be found in branches of pussy willows with the bright azure of the sky glimmering through.

It is largely due to the strong contrasts of light and shadow that it was lithographed (in fact, it was the only lithograph that was made on the basis of Ferenczy's works), although he simplified the composition for this purpose, made the contrast of dark and light stronger and light and shadow were contrasted in more homogeneous surfaces.