In the last third of the 19th century, the more and more diversified Hungarian painting, caught up with the current European trends in the major works of Pál Szinyei Merse, around 1870. Although he only got to Paris at an old age, he discovered plein air as a method of conveying the form-giving and colouring effect of sunlight more or less the same time as, but independently of, the impressionists. The coherence of a Szinyei’s painting is not ensured by a single predominant tone but by the equal light values of many different colour patches. He painted Picnic in May – regarded as one of the finest Hungarian paintings – upon a return to Munich, recalling his wanderings in Upper Hungary and the joyous picnics of the Munich artists. In his autobiography, he wrote the following: “I painted myself into the picture prone, munching away, with my back to the spectator. I must admit, I thought of the critics who would dislike my picture”. His guess was right: his contemporaries ridiculed him and his epochal significance was only discovered half a generation later.
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