The Sounds of Childlike Innocence and Paternal Emotion

in István Csók’s Züzü cycle and Károly Ferenczy’s portraits of his own children

Abstract

The paper presents and analyses the drawings and paintings of István Csók and Károly Ferenczy on their own children, taking into account the influence of the reformist pedagogical trends of the time and the child studies movement on the painters’ view of man and child. The main question posed in this paper is how the new ideological and historical currents of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (together with evolutionism) influenced the artists’ approach, what factors led to the increased registration of children’s life in painting, which aspects and motifs of children’s life were emphasized, and how these motifs are related to the pedagogical trends of the time. One of the most comprehensive results of the analyses is that István Csók and Károly Ferenczy turned to the observation of the various stages of children’s lives with a profound interest in the development of the child’s soul, free of sentimentalism, which clearly indicates that these painters were not immune to the reception of the increasingly widespread approach of the reformist pedagogical movement of child studies.