Dominik Skutecký

Venetian genre scenes and the copper hammer mills of Banská Bystrica — two worlds of one painter. Born in Gajary in the Záhorie region, he grew up in Vienna, where he trained with the sculptor Johann Meixner and at the Academy; a scholarship took him in 1867 to Venice to Pompeo Molmenti, he passed through Florence and Munich, and from 1873 he earned his living in Vienna as a portraitist. In 1875 he exhibited for the first time at the Vienna Künstlerhaus and from 1877 regularly at the Budapest Műcsarnok, where he won a bronze (1885) and a gold medal (1896).

In 1889 he settled permanently in Banská Bystrica: he portrayed the burghers, painted markets and above all the workers of the copper hammer mills, which made his pictures a unique document of industrial Slovakia. In 1902 he organised an exhibition of more than 120 works in the town. His work is held by the Slovak National Gallery and, since 1994, by the permanent exhibition of the Central Slovak Gallery in his villa in Banská Bystrica.