Mednyánszky [antikvár]

I852-1919 Báron László Mednyánszky was born a few years after the suppression of the Hungárián War of Independence, on April 23, 1852, at Beckó (Czechoslovakia), in the castle of his forefathers. He came from one of the oldest families of the Hungárián aristocracy. Himself delicate in health and of a romantic disposition, he could count among the long line of his ancestors, scholars, thinkers and heroes who gave their lives in the long struggles for national liberty. The Mednyánszkys came from Poland to settle in Hungary sometime during the thirteenth century, and it was from King Andreas II that they received their first estate, Medne, in Trencsén County. With the gift of this land went the right to use the name of Mednei which in the course of time was changed into Mednyánszky. The latest members of the family, to add to the long record of its honourable achievements, were the painter's father and two uncles who fought manfully in the 1848-49 Hungárián War of Independence against Austrian oppression; after this rising had been crushed, the elder of the two uncles was hanged by order of Haynau, the cruel new commander-in-chief appointed to Hungary by the imperial government; the younger died in exile. His parents expended every care on the education of László, a child with a weak constitution and sensitive nerves. He was taught at home. The compelling beauty of his environment-the old corridors in the castles of Beckó and Nagyőr (now Beckov and Strázky in Czechoslovakia), alive with medieval legends, the halls full of mysterious secrets where-as he wrote in his diary-"the darkness is heavy with hovering ghosts and shadows, the odour of tombs and the wails of doomed ghosts," the crags of the Vág valley, the snow-clad peaks of the High Tátra-all this cast a life-long spell on a boy already inclined to contemplation and reverie. "From my earliest youth the contemplation of nature has been my chief occupation, the content of my life," he recorded. His talent soon became evident. At Nagyőr, during the years 1863-64, he learnt to draw from the Viennese landscape painter, Thomas Ender, who was at that time staying in Hungary. Although his parents had destined him to become an engineer and he had attended preliminary classes at the Polytechnic College in Zürich, he felt that art was his true vocation, and in 1873 he enrolled in the Academy of Painting at Munich where he became the pupil first of