Horse bathing (1930-as évek második fele)

Ferenc Helbing worked in almost all genres of fine art and applied graphics, he was undoubtedly one of the most outstanding artists of Art Nouveau poster art and advertising graphics in Hungary, but he also designed newspaper covers, book bindings, calendars, ex libris, as well as stamps, banknotes and diplomas. He had an astonishing career: he started as a printer, became a highly respected and recognised graphic designer in the early 1900s, even exhibiting at art fairs, and later became one of the most important figures in the training of applied graphic artists, a teacher at the School of Applied Arts, and finally its director, an influential figure in the art world between the two wars, and a ministerial adviser. 

His career had several high points. In 1902 he produced his Dream, one of the best known and most beautiful works of Hungarian Art Nouveau lithography. In 1910 he was appointed to the School of Applied Arts, where he was asked to teach lithography. This invitation gave him the opportunity to educate new generations, to put into practice the principles he had developed in connection with industrial art education, and in fact to develop the character of Hungarian applied graphic art education. Helbing also received a number of government commissions: he designed the new koruna banknotes and the new pengo banknotes between the two wars. Between 1914 and 1936, in the last two decades of his career, Helbing no longer concentrated primarily on advertising and commercial graphics, his activities being concentrated in three different areas until his retirement in 1936.He worked as a teacher, a graphic designer and an industrial artist, fulfilling state commissions, and for his own pleasure he painted and produced illustrations. He continued to exhibit in the 1940s and, as he had trained generations of painters and graphic artists during his career as an art teacher, his influence can be traced in Hungarian art of the second half of the 20th century (his students included Gyula Kaesz, Piroska Szántó, Endre Bálint, Amerigo Tot, Sigismund Kolos-Vary, among others).

The painting Horse Bathing 'dresses' (or rather undresses) the Arcadian theme of Helbing's works from the Centenary in a different guise. A troop of perfect, muscular and vigorous soldiers are painted with idealised but naturalistic fidelity and, as is typical of many of Helbing's works, mixed with eroticism. The theme appeared in several Hungarian painters in the first half of the 20th century (e.g. Károly Kernstok, Ödön Márffy).