Conversation (1868)

Péter Fáy was born as the son of the imperial and royal captain Péter Fáy and Count Zsuzsanna Beleznay. He was educated in Vienna, then worked in Kassa in the 1840s and in Pest from the 1850s. From 1872 he was a member of the National Society of Fine Arts. In 1873, he painted a painting of the Baptism of Christ on the altar of the church of St Catherine in Taban. In addition to his religious works, Albert Fáy painted portraits, landscapes, still lifes and many of his historical paintings can be found in the museum in Kassa and in the Hungarian Historical Picture Gallery. 

The Conversation (1868) is one of the Biedermeier genre painting, which was a typically bourgeois art and a Hungarian peculiarity. It is characterised by its theatricality (the characters stand almost in a single line, they are not covered, their posture is rigid) and by a simple storytelling that the viewer can easily weave on. Here we are presumably looking at a drunken party, their clothes are pinned and dawn has broken. At the same time, the portrait of the man facing the viewer may remind us of Ferenc Deák, one of the protagonists of Hungarian history at the time the picture was taken, and a pioneer of the Compromise.