Goose shepherd boy (1912)

One Italian critic called Maria Lehel a "pittice viaggiatrice", or travelling painter, who lived in Italy for more than thirty years. The statement is apt not only because it shows an almost cross-section of Mária Lehel's eventful career, rich in turns, but also because it suggests something of the restless search for self that the artist was already making at a young age to find her own painterly language.

Mária Lehel studied in Nagybánya between 1906 and 1914, first as a pupil of Károly Ferenczy and later of Béla Iványi-Grünwald. It was here, around 1906, that she met Ferenc Lehel, her future husband. In 1911 she was invited to the first exhibition of the Eight. After World War I, pastel technique became almost exclusive for her. In 1924 she moved with her family to Paris, where she met the painters Marc Chagall and Jules Pascin. She exhibited in almost every major city in the world, from London to Rome and São Paulo. In Paris, she studied modern painting of the turn of the century and was a follower of Matisse. Her paintings are characterised by an extraordinary richness of colour and a blending of shades. The Italian State bought several of her paintings for the museums of Milan and Genoa. In 1944 she exhibited at the Fészek Klub. During World War II, almost half a hundred of her paintings were destroyed by bombing. She settled in Genoa in 1946 and travelled all over Europe as a painter until her death. She had only one exhibition in Hungary during her lifetime, and on her 80th birthday in 1969 her works were shown at the Institute of Cultural Relations.

Since her works have been scattered and lost in the world, the exact dates of her exhibitions have also become obscured over time. The complete oeuvre is still to be processed. The painting Goose Shepherd was painted by Maria Lehel in 1912, in Nagybánya. By this time, the artists of the artists' colony had abandoned the naturalistic approach of plein air painting and turned towards a more Parisian direction, represented by Matisse and the Fauve. Lehel was then still on the borderline. The composition of The Goose-keeper is a reference to her former master's painting Bathing Boys (Summer, 1902), where two young naked boys are wading into a stream while the landscape around them is vibrantly green. However, Lehel only depicts a boy chasing his runaway goose, perhaps symbolically suggesting that she too had left Ferenczy to continue her studies with Iványi (the master who had also defected to the young artists, to the group of 'neo').