PAÁL, László
(b. 1846, Zám, d. 1879, Charenton)

Morning in the Forest

1875
Oil on canvas, 95 x 65 cm
Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, Budapest

László Paál studied in Munich and spent his short, hard life in Paris and the woods of Fontainebleau, where he introduced the principles of the Barbizon school to Hungarian landscape art. he tended to paint tracks, village streets or the fringes of peaceful forests, with lofty or crooked tree trunks bathed in gentle sunlight, the silvery green and sandy brown subtly nuanced, and highlighting afforded by a whitewashed house or the clothing of an old woman in the middle distance. Mildly elegiac moods mattered more to him than visual structure or the division of colours.

Morning in the Forest is one of the masterpieces of the artist's mature period.