Even before starting school, I would occasionally find myself pondering questions of attribution – as a kind of game, of course, without any awareness of the importance of “attribution” in the discipline of art history. My father was the curator of Italian painting at the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, and he introduced me to the art of Fra Angelico, Simone Martini, Carlo Crivelli, and other Italian masters through the books of the Classici dell’ Arte series published by Rizzoli. This meant that I became quite good at identifying these masters’ paintings in my early years.

Although in later childhood I stopped playing “identify-the-painter” for a time, my family life was suffused with art in diverse ways, from amateur enthusiasm to professional responsibility. Our holidays abroad, mainly to Italian destinations, also focused on museums and churches with major paintings. I first visited the Netherlands in the year of my graduation from high school. It was a short trip, just a few days, but it proved to be a watershed moment. I was fascinated by the atmosphere in the cities and enthralled by the temporary exhibit Rembrandt: The Master And His Workshop at the Rijksmuseum. The experience prompted me to immediately buy a Dutch language book at the local flea market: I decided to study Dutch alongside art history at the university.

Júlia Tátrai with Melchior d’Hondecoeter’s Waterfowl

For most of my student years, I was under the spell of fifteenth-century Netherlandish painting. I remember being particularly impressed by the catalogue of the exhibition produced by Henk van Os on the art of devotion in the late Middle Ages in Europe, 1300-1500 (Gebed in schoonheid: Schatten van privé-devotie in Europa 1300-1500). I was fortunately awarded scholarships to attend language and art history courses in the Netherlands and Flanders as part of my training.

My first appointment after graduating from university was to a position at the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. Our department had a dual mandate: we were responsible for artworks with designated protection under cultural heritage laws, besides which we also provided an official art appraisal service. This job meant constant close contact with numerous artworks, and I learned to judge works from different periods, as well as different genres, techniques, and quality. This multi-faceted exercise greatly honed my skills in connoisseurship and library research. Some of the artworks submitted to us for appraisal from Hungarian private collections were significant pieces that proved worthy of closer examination. These included Barent Fabritius’s The Sacrifice of Manoah, Willem de Poorter’s Allegory of Colonial Power and Karel van Mallery’s Albert VII on the Catafalque – which I discussed in scholarly articles and which were purchased by the Museum of Fine Arts. Although I was not yet curator at the Department of Old Master Paintings, I was heavily involved in studying the museum’s Netherlandish collection from the outset. I particularly enjoyed translating Rudi Ekkart’s specialist catalogue of our Dutch and Flemish portraits into Hungarian. Another high point was contributing to the exhibition catalogue of the museum’s grand Compiégne show, with catalogue entries on several seventeenth-century Dutch paintings that had previously belonged to the Esterházy collection – the nucleus of the museum’s art collection.

The Szépművészeti Múzeum during the exhibition Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age in 2014

In 2010, I became the first Hungarian to receive a research grant from the Alfred and Isabella Bader Foundation. A year later, Ildikó Ember, the head of the Department of Old Master Paintings, invited me to her department to co-curate a major exhibition of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. The exhibition Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age, which was held in 2014-2015 with the help of numerous major international loans and the collaboration of foreign colleagues, was one of the most popular and successful temporary exhibitions at the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. Almost all the authors who contributed to the accompanying catalogue were CODART members, with many of whom we had long enjoyed excellent professional and friendly relations. These included – to mention just a few of a very long list – Anja Sevcik, Quentin Buvelot, Liesbeth M. Helmus, Norbert Middelkoop, Tom van der Molen, Pieter Roelofs, and – a particular honor – Gary Schwartz. CODART held a two-day Focus program in Budapest to coincide with the exhibition: the lectures and discussions on some of our paintings with uncertain attributions have stayed with me ever since. I also fondly recall the work on the Festschrift for Ildikó Ember’s 70th birthday, entitled Geest en Gratie, which again contains numerous essays by CODART members.

Alongside my position as Curator of the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish collections, I was appointed Head of the Department of Old Master Paintings in 2015. CODART’s wonderful professional community and network have always played an important role in my work. One of the best examples of this cooperation was the exhibition Dutch Old Masters from Budapest at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem in 2016, which was initiated by Marrigje Rikken. To date, this was the largest exhibition in another country presenting our Dutch collection of paintings and drawings in the history of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts – with a total of eighty of our works displayed in the context of related pieces owned by the Haarlem museum. We subsequently arranged a new permanent exhibition in the renovated building, with a revised concept: rather than an installation structured strictly around national schools, seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings are now shown together, with a largely thematic organization. This makes it easier to study and compare similarities and differences as well as coexisting trends.

Over the past fifteen to twenty years, the Museum of Fine Arts has had more opportunities than before to mount large-scale permanent and temporary exhibitions – and also to purchase major artworks on the international market. One acquisition of extraordinary significance was Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of Mary Henrietta Stuart, made on the occasion of her marriage – at just nine years of age – to the future stadholder of the Netherlands, William II of Orange. Following its purchase, the painting was presented to the public in a “chamber exhibition” that I organized, where it was shown primarily alongside portraits of other children of contemporary monarchs.

Press conference at the opening of Rubens, Van Dyck, and the Splendour of Flemish Painting in 2019

The next show I curated was Rubens, Van Dyck and the Splendour of Flemish Painting, which opened in autumn 2019. Part of a series of large-scale Old Masters exhibitions, the event attracted around 175,000 visitors. Besides seventeenth-century Flemish works, it featured a piece created especially for this show by the internationally celebrated Hungarian artist Balázs Kicsiny, reflecting on Rubens’s Death of Seneca from a contemporary perspective. In addition, we organized a conference around the theme of the exhibition, with lectures by experts such as Nils Büttner, Justin Davies, and Bert Schepers.

The museum’s recent acquisitions include outstanding seventeenth-century Dutch works such as Adriaen Coorte’s Still Life With Strawberries, Gerard van Honthorst’s The Penitent Magdalene, and Jacob van Loo’s Danae. Following the purchase of the latter painting, and during the travel restrictions of the Covid-19 period, I curated the small exhibition Divine Seduction: Erotica and Passion in Five Centuries of Mythological Depictions, with a selection of artworks exclusively from our own collection.

Besides essays and entries for exhibition catalogues, my publications have focused mainly on subjects of iconography, attribution, and collection history. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the history of collecting seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings in Hungary. The thesis discusses the Hungarian aspects of Dutch and Flemish artworks in a historical (and cultural-historical) context, from relations between Hungary and the Low Countries in the sixteenth century – including the presence and the collecting history of Netherlandish works in Hungary – to the present day. The dissertation is currently being translated into English. I very much hope that it will also supply a substantial amount of new data for the RKD Gerson Digital project.

I am currently working on a new large-scale exhibition with a selection of artworks by the Brueg(h)el family and the closely-related painters Teniers and Van Kessel, as well as the sculptor Quellinus, based on the excellent collection of Flemish paintings, prints, and drawings possessed by the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. The selection will be supplemented and enriched by masterpieces from international loans. The exhibition, scheduled to open in autumn 2027, aims to show how later generations of artists passed on thematic and stylistic traditions while also striving to achieve innovation through unique and inventive solutions. As on previous occasions, many CODART members have already supported me in preparing this exhibition and I feel confident that I can continue to count on the kind and generous cooperation of my colleagues in the future. Finally, we are looking forward to seeing you all in Budapest for the opening of the show – or perhaps for another CODARTfocus program?

Júlia Tátrai is Head of the Department of Old Masters at the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest. She has been a member of CODART since 2003.