Ladislav Mednyánszky

A baron from Beckov and one of Central Europe's greatest landscape painters of the turn of the century: trained privately by Thomas Ender at the Strážky manor, then in Munich and at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts, he joined the Barbizon school in 1875, working alongside Odilon Redon.

His melancholy landscapes with masterly light made him an auction phenomenon — his Evening Mood (1911) became the most expensive painting ever auctioned in Slovakia at €250,000; the Slovak National Gallery devotes a permanent exhibition to him at Strážky. The oil sketch of a tree in our collection represents the very register with which he conquered Barbizon.