Cacti (1898)

Son of painter György Vastagh. He studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, soon to become one of our most distinguished animal painters. First, like Géza Mészöly, he painted the hens and ducks of the poultry farm. Later he became known for his lion and tiger paintings, for which he made studies in North Africa and in zoos. His work won several prizes and his wildlife paintings were mainly in the possession of English art lovers. His legacy exhibition, held in 1920, showed almost 1,500 of his works and all stages of his artistic development.

Initially a German-bred painter, he was characterised by the painstaking draughtsmanship and modelling of Munich painting, but later, influenced by the French Impressionists, his plein air painting became much more colourful. He was also not very concerned with the problems of movement in this style of painting, because he usually depicted his animals in a kind of resting position and did not try to give the impression of mobility. 

Géza Vastagh received a state scholarship in 1898 and spent four months in Algiers, Tunis and the African desert. From his trip to Algiri, he brought with him some very attractive sketches of landscapes, such as Cacti (1898), which he then diligently used as a background for his lion compositions. The dormant tendencies to paint landscapes awakened in him later on, so that at the beginning of this century he brought back pastels of the Highlands and especially of the slopes of the High Tatras, which are so successful that they deserve to be acknowledged as landscape painters.