Mihály Munkácsy was a Hungarian painter of international renown, celebrated for his genre pictures and large-scale biblical paintings. Born Mihály Lieb in 1844 in the small Hungarian village of Munkacs, the orphan and apprentice carpenter catapulted to fame overnight after earning a gold medal at the 1870 Paris Salon with The Last Day of Condemned Man and became a coveted painter-prince in Paris among European and American collectors. Once he established himself in Paris after the Franco-Prussian War, the realism of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon School came to influence Munkácsy's style of painting. In 1874, the artist married the Baroness des Marches, the widow of his deceased Luxembourg patron and this brought about a striking change in the artist's work.

Fig. 1 Mihály Munkáscy, photographed by Nadar. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, FT 4-NA-238 (27).

Munkácsy turned away from the dark, somber images that characterized his early pictures and embraced a bright and joyful mode of painting, leaving the poverty of Hungarian village life for the elegance of the French capital's Salons. In 1878, he received a medal of honor at the Exposition Universelle at the end of which he was made an Officer of the Legion of Honor; he was raised to Chevalier the following year. His splendid townhouse on the posh Avenue de Villier, completed in 1880, was one of the most elegant salons in Paris, where the artist held sparkling soirées attended by celebrities from the worlds of art, literature and music, including Liszt, Massenet, Taine, Dumas and Doré.

The sitter pictured here in an elaborate interior is Princess Soutzo (1854–1925), the Romanian-born Princess of Moldova, a fixture on the Parisian social scene and an acquaintance of the artist and his wife. Princess Soutzo attended a soirée musicale hosted by M. and Mme. Munkáscy on April 27, 1890, as reported in The New York Herald, two years after the portrait was painted. Arranged to suggest the bourgeois ideals of domesticity, prosperity, and refinement, the private space is exalted as the material foundation of propriety and individual taste.

The magisterial portrait features prominently in a photograph of Munkáscy in his Paris studio.

Fig. 2 Mihály Munkáscy in his Paris studio with the Portrait of Princess Soutzo at right, circa 1885-1890. Photograph probably taken by Edmond Bénard (1838-1907). Photographs of Artists in their Studios Collection. Courtesy of The Frick Collection/Frick Art Reference Library Archives, Gift of Frank W. Stokes, 1940.