A Budapest Guest

At Budapest’s Fine Arts Museum at the moment there is a visiting exhibition that I looked round quickly this afternoon. It was packed with people, and so I will go back again when the Christmas and New Year crowds have abated.

But even during a cursory visit several pictures caught my eye. They included: this - for its decorative borders, amusing cherubs and splendid dog; and this - the person I went with asserted all such flower paintings are boringly the same, but I think some, this one included, are wonderful; apart from anything else, as well as flowers, you get a bumble bee, a grasshopper and an exquisite mouse; and this - which really needs to be seen in reality, as the glow and liveliness that Rubens creates on the canvas somehow does not  get conveyed by photographs; and this - mainly because I wanted to look at it properly but couldn’t over the heads of others, as I would like to see if it is really as oddly modern looking for a 17th century painting as it appeared from the glimpse I had; and this - as with the Rubens, the reproduction does not do it justice; and this - partly for the dogs annoying each other in the bottom left hand corner, partly for the feeling that all the pictures in the room in which this one is hung are less paintings than windows into the past; and this - which is tiny and very beautifully painted. There was also an image from the Prado that I didn’t get the name of; it looked like surrealism but was made in the 1600s.

I shall go back quite soon and find out more.