page_title: Mihály Munkácsy
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: Mihály Munkácsy / Early years
context_page_description: Mihály Munkácsy was a Hungarian painter. He earned international reputation with his genre pictures and large-scale biblical paintings.
context_section_description: Munkácsy was born as Michael Leo Lieb (Lieb Mihály Leó) to Mihály Lieb, an bureaucrat of Bavarian origin, and Cecília Reök, in Munkács, Hungary, Austrian Empire, the town from which he later adopted his pseudonym.
  After being apprenticed to itinerant painter Elek Szamossy, Munkácsy went to Pest, the largest city in Hungary (now part of Budapest), where he sought the patronage of established artists. 
  With the help of the landscape artist Antal Ligeti, he received a state grant to study abroad. In 1865, he studied at the Academy of Vienna under Karl Rahl. In 1866, he studied at the Munich Academy, and in 1868 he moved to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf to study with the popular genre painter Ludwig Knaus. In 1867, he travelled to Paris to see the Universal Exposition.
  After his Paris trip, his style became lighter, with broader brushstrokes and tonal colour schemes - he was probably influenced by modern French painting seen at the Exposition.
  In his early career Munkácsy painted mainly scenes from the daily lives of peasants and poor people. First he followed the colourful, theatrical style of contemporary Hungarian genre painters (e. g. Károly Lotz, János Jankó), for example in The Cauldron (1864) or Easter Merrymaking (1865). In the next years he paid more attention to the landscape around his figures (Storm in the Puszta, 1867). From the Düsseldorf genre painters he learnt to represent different emotions in his figures and to treat them as a group (The Last Day of a Condemned Man, 1869). He is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting.
caption: Pluckmakers (Tépéscsinálók) by Mihály Munkácsy (1871)
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