Cemetery in Nagybecskerek (1890)

He started painting under the guidance of Antal Ligeti, without any academic studies. From 1886 he participated in exhibitions with naturalistic landscapes. He was awarded prizes in Paris in 1900 and in London in 1908. In 1902 he published the memoirs of Miklós Barabás. After that, he travelled abroad extensively, studying foreign art collections from Constantinople to Edinburgh. He is one of our most outstanding and popular landscape painters, whose works have won recognition for Hungarian art abroad. Many of his landscapes have been exported abroad (mainly to San Francisco in America). 

The important events of László Kézdi-Kovács's life and career are connected with Nagybecskerek, today's Zrenjanin. As he writes in his autobiography of 1906, preserved in the manuscript archives of the Hungarian National Gallery, in the spring of 1887, "I went down to my mother's in Nagybecskerek, and here, at her request... I joined the county as a comptroller". He worked there for more than two years and then became the chief editor of the weekly Torontál, alongside Gusztáv Lauka, the poet and editor-in-chief. In the meantime, he did not give up his ambition to become a painter. At the same time he painted his watercolour Cemetery of Nagybecskerek. After he was convinced that his pleasing naturalistic landscape motifs had attracted the public and won the appreciation of the gentry, he felt that the time had come to organise a major exhibition after the bookstore and studio debut. In May 1892, together with Antal Streitmann, he organised a real exhibition for charitable purposes, in keeping with the present-day circumstances. According to the Torontal, this exhibition was 'certainly the first of its kind in Nagybecskerek', and it also praised the pioneering work of the two artists. László Kézdi Kovács's paintings were exhibited in three rooms, where some larger compositions were on display among numerous smaller life paintings and watercolours. Kézdi Kovács moved to Budapest, where he had more opportunities for further training and artistic expression. But he still remained attached to the town on the Béga, his family ties were also linked to it, and he returned to Becskerek to paint and exhibit his works.