Henrik Weber

Henrik Wéber known as Henrik Weber (24 May 1818, in Pest – 14 May 1866, in Pest) was a Hungarian portrait and history painter in the Realism movement. He is considered as one of the most important Hungarian painters of the Biedermeier period.

Henrik Weber was as an excellent portrait painter of his time and a significant figure in Hungarian history painting. Accordingly, he was one of the members of artists working on the creation of national art in the 1830s and 1840s. His most successful paintings are the death of John Hunyadi, the King Matthias and Ilonka Szép, and the King Solomon in prison. He had a great influence on his contemporaries, and his students included Károly Lotz. In the 1860s, he made lithographs presenting Hungarian historical events for the journal “Az Ország Tükre”.

The Hungarian National Gallery preserves several paintings and drawings of this master of the Biedermeier painting.

Early life Henrik Weber was born in Pest, Kingdom of Hungary. His father, Mihaly Wéber, immigrated to Hungary from abroad and soon became a respected merchant. Wishing at all costs that his son would become a scientist, he not only did his best to train his son, but also required him to spend all his free time with books.

Although the young Weber was eager to study, he preferred painting and drawing much more and pondering on his picture books for hours. His books were filled with all sorts of magnificent figures he drew. His father once noticed this and surprised him with a master of drawing, a local artist named János Tóbiás Kaergling (1780-1845). Under whose leadership he soon made such great progress that both his teachers and colleagues encouraged him to a painter career with the best of hopes.

Austrian period

After graduating from high school in 1834, he enrolled at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1835. Here, in addition to his studies, he taught art lessons, taught drawing and worked as lithographer to provide for his basic necessities of life. In particular, he was the student of Johann Ender and Leopold Kupelwieser, who taught the history of aesthetics. Under their influence, he rejected the prevailing Academicism and embraced Realism. But also, through his great diligence as well as his talent, he soon became one of the most outstanding students of the institute. This is best demonstrated by the Academy’s laudatory diplomas and the Gundel-Preis awarded in 1837, which rewarded him as the most deserving. In 1838 he took part in the exhibition "Der Fischerknabe" and "Toilette einer Braut" at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in Vienna with his genre paintings "Palmsonntag" in the year of his return.

German period When he returned to Hungary in 1839, he was already recognized as an artist who had exhibited abroad. But Weber's ambitions were not satisfied by his orders. Not being a portrait painter, so that, displeased with the rudimentary artistic relations, he soon traveled abroad. Already in 1840, we find it in Munich, in the company of the greatest artists of his time, Kaulbach, Cornelius, Genelli, Hess and others. He became a student at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, where he graduated in 1842. He also interrupted this stay in Munich twice, in 1841 and 1842, during which time he visited Tyrol and Switzerland for landscape studies.

Italian period

Then in 1845, he went on an artistic tour again through Italy until 1847.