Szomory Dezső

Szomory Dezső (1869 to 1944) was one of the most distinctive Hungarian writers of his generation, a novelist and playwright known for an ornate, musical prose style. György Rauscher painted him in 1927.

The finished portrait is in the Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, and a preparatory study is held at the Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum (/bibliography#mng-szomory; /bibliography#szamado-2019, pp. 11-12, 18).

Who he was

Szomory built his reputation in the theatre and in fiction, with a body of plays and novels that made his name a byword for stylistic refinement in early-twentieth-century Hungarian letters. He was a Jewish writer, and he died in Budapest in 1944, in the war that destroyed so much of that world.

The Rauscher portrait

The portrait belongs to Rauscher’s Hungarian years, when his sitters were drawn from the Budapest literary and bourgeois world (see /biography/hungarian-years). It was shown in the 1927 Ernst Múzeum group exhibition, and the Pesti Hírlap critic read it as “almost ascetically cold” (/bibliography#pesti-hirlap-1927-09-11).

It survives in two versions: the finished portrait in the Magyar Nemzeti Galéria (/works/szomory-dezso-1927) and a preparatory study at the Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum (/works/szomory-dezso-study-1927).