Seaside city (Around 1936)

Dezső Fáy visited Italy for the first time in 1907, where he spent five months and lived with Lajos Gulácsy in Verona. Although these were difficult times, which were spent in almost total anonymity, Fáy remembered them fondly. 'It was like sitting on Wells' time machine, travelling back to the cinquecento. I was a wealthy marchese and Gulácsy was a prince exiled from his country who happened to console himself with art', he said in one of his interviews. 

Fáy then returned to Italy regularly. His late paintings show an intensification of realistic traits and a classicising Renaissance conception of the novecento. He usually uses landscape elements simplified into geometric forms. The figures show the stolen moments and vivid character sketches seen in his prints, but compared with, say, János Vaszary's contemporary Italian seascapes and parks, Fáy is archaic rather than a chronicler of the modern world. 'Quiet emotions in the paintings, which are often like a quattrocento memory brought back with us from the dreamy air of an Italian gallery', wrote Artúr Elek in the journal Magyar Művészet in 1930.