The age-herald., 1899-01-11
MUNKACSY'S
SACRIFICE

tury, the painter of Christ Before Pilate" and "Ecee Homo," pictures that have made thousands weep-has been pronounced hopelessly mad, and "Finis" has been writ ten at the end of his great career. It is unnecessary to await the coming formality of death, for already the genius. the rare mind that was Munkacsy, is dead The great frame of the Hungarian artist Is wasted, the leonine head bent, the deep-set eyes that were wont to glow with the pas- sion of his painting are dim. wi-s Munkacsy scrawled his name at the cor ner of his great painting, he wrote the epitaph of his reason. At that instant his wizard hand forever lost it's cunning. His ''Ecce Homo was his suicide; it was the masters masterpiece-and his death blow
 Physicians and alienists agree that Munkacsy's terrible collapse is due to his intense application upon "Ecce Homo," the latest and greatest of his paintings. The master worked almost necessarily upon the picture for eight months. He ate but lit- tie, and slept less; he took no exercise, re- celved no visitors and only left his mansion in the Rue Villiers once during the whole eight months And that was in order to find a model for his Christ
 Wandering through the streets of Paris, searching from right to left the gaunt man with the cavernous eyes seized a with delicate features, a spiritual ex- pression and a curling beard. Munkacsy grasped his arm so tightly that he left his great finger marks upon the slighter mans arm for many a day "Be my Christi" de- manded the Hungarian. "The one I have imagined is finished, but he does not suit Come, I pray you!' The big, seedy in- dividual with the glowing eyes frightened the smaller man. He walked to the man. sion in the Rue Villiers with the wild stranger, but he was careful to keep well out of reach. It needed the magic name of Munkacsy on the door-plate to reassure him.
 With the stranger as a model, the mas ter painted day after day, but still the Christ did not please him.'I like better the one I imagined. Gor he said angrily, plotting out the wor kof a week with a furious stroke, and the stranger carried away pocketful of francs and the con- viction that he had been locked in the studio with lunatic.
 Steadily Munkacsy painted his "Ecce t1OUlO Hunger ne ulu not knOW. lie drove away the servants who came to announce that meals were ready, and only allowed a tray of food to be passed into the room upon the indignant demand of his wife. Often sleep did not visit him for seventy-two hours, and when weariness compelled him to drop his brush he lay in a tense, half-conscious state, his face thin and white as that of a corpse. No one in- truded upon the solitude of his studio ex- cept madame, and that under silent suffer- ance.
 A victim of his ceaseless energy, Mun-- kacsy was as well the victim of his pow erful imagination. The fury of an intense dramatic instinct wrought upon him as an overmastering stimulant, and goaded him to a state close to madness. He was at one with the taunting Pharsees and the cruel Roman soldiery, as he painted those later figures. Their hatred for the calm figure on the portico was his his quick, angry strokes followed each other. And every day had there been anyone there to see, he would have noted that the master grew more gaunt, his eyes more like flames bursting from caVernS, his face winter, his movements more nervous and uncertain!
 At last it was finished. The colossal Christ looked sadly down upon the rabble from the portico of the Roman building Pontius Pilate, cold, impassive, stood at the right, a Roman soldier the grim figure at his left. Below, the Jews strove with the soldiers to get a closer view and bet ter chance to mock the pretender. The fig- ure on the canvas breathed rage. It was, indeed, finished, and the artist studied it musngly from his divan. But he had for gotten something. He staggered back to the painting and seized a brush. His strength hardly sufficed for the nasty scrawing of his name upon the canvas, down close to the portico, and then Munkascy laughed-a strange laugh from the man who had been silent for eight months-a shrill laugh, that sounded like a cry-and fell prostrate before his picture. His brain was wreck. He was helplessly mad.
 The watchful wife, denied admittance, was listening at the door and rushed in at his cry He was tenderly carried from the room, which had latterly been a torture chamber. No child was ever more helpless. The doctors pronounced his case spinal paralysis. Madame had heard him say that he wanted to die in Hungary, the country of his birth, her country and his. He was taken to Budapest. For a time he was kept at their home in the Hungarian city, but he developed the fury of maniac, and had to be removed to a hospital in the suburbs, where he still remains
 Munkacsy is 54 years of age, and his wife, before her marriage was the Bar oness de Marches. He began life as car- penter, the trade of his father. In the days of his poverty he painted family por- trait for coat His Christ Before Pilate" was sold to an American millionaire fop