MARKÓ, Ferenc
(b. 1832, Eisenstadt, d. 1874, Budapest)

Biography

Painter and draughtsman, son of Károly Markó the Elder. He studied first with his father then for two years at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence, where he concentrated on life drawing and figure painting. He took part in the struggle for Italian independence and was imprisoned (before 1853) for his political drawings. Subsequently he painted landscapes of the Appennines and of Rome and Carrara.

In 1853 he moved permanently back to Hungary. Although he was interested in the Hungarian countryside and particularly the Hungarian Plain, whose hamlets he depicted in romantic drawings and whose farm life he painted in Shepherd on a Donkey (1854), he moved away from his father's style and subject-matter. He began instead to give a new emphasis to the agricultural labourers and the life of the simple man, rather than to the idealized landscape. The development of his painterly style, which was characterized by a lively everyday atmosphere, was influenced by the Viennese Biedermeier genre painting and by the Munich school.

He took part in the exhibitions of the Pest Artists Association and the Österreichische Kunstverein. At the age of 40 he went mad, dying not long after. His most successful paintings, such as Young Woman in the Stream (1855) and Corn Harvester (1863), are in the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest.