Portrait of Pál Szinyei Merse

Portrait of Pál Szinyei Merse at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest depicts a fellow painter — the Hungarian artist who would become one of the founders of modern Hungarian painting and whose plein-air approach had parallels with Leibl's own. The two met in Munich in the late 1860s when both were developing their rejection of academic convention toward more direct observation. Szinyei Merse went on to paint the celebrated Picnic in May (1873), a Hungarian landmark of outdoor figure painting, and this early Leibl portrait captures him as a young artist still forging his mature approach.

The portrait has the freshness of a work painted in a relatively short session — Leibl's handling is more spontaneous here than in his more labored portrait commissions, the face captured with loose, confident strokes that convey the sitter's character without dwelling over surface details.