Walking to the City Park ice skating rink (1908)

Kálmán Tichy was nine years younger than his brother Gyula. Their upbringing and interests were similar, both became painters and graphic artists. Kálmán spent a long time with Simon Hollósy in Munich, and in 1907 he became a student at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts. Even as a student, he often exhibited his watercolours and pen-and-ink drawings at the exhibitions of the Young Artists' Association. His finely stylized, decorative and technically brilliant colour watercolours also won the favour of Pál Szinyei Merse.

The Ice Rink in City Park (Városliget) began welcoming the skating crowds on 29 January 1870, when Crown Prince Rudolf solemnly opened its doors. The opening of the ice rink was made possible by the Skating Association, founded on 12 November 1869 in the card room of the Steingasser (Petőfi) Café on the banks of the Danube. They, after long and persistent intercession, obtained permission from the City Council to set up a skating rink on a part of the lake in City Park every winter, where the ladies and gentlemen of Pest could enjoy all the pleasures of skating free of charge. The first 'skating hall' was a small two-room wooden shed on the shore of the lake, which tragically burnt down in 1874. The town council then gave the final go-ahead for the construction of a new building, which was completed within a few years to plans by the architect Oedön Lechner. At that time, nowhere in the world was there such a continuous open ice rink as the Városligeti in Budapest. In 1895, a new neo-baroque building was erected to the design of Imre Francsek, and the construction of the new building coincided with the start of the lake regulation works.

In Tichy's gouache-painting from 1908, two female figures walk towards the artificial ice rink in Városliget, holding skates that can be attached to their shoes. They are both dressed in the fashionable attire of the time: long skirts and coats, hats, which they also wore while skating. The work was made at the same time as the graphic work Female Nude in an Interior, and their techniques, colours and style are similar. A Walking to the City Park Skating Rink shows the influence of Art Nouveau (line, flatness), Nabis (pastel colours, building forms from larger patches) and especially Rippl-Rónai's paintings from the last decade of the 19th century.