Kiss Jolán foto (Budapest. Olaszfasor 5.) (1943 körül)

On the 15th of March, after their historical photo album, Széchényi National Library published their first portrait collection, making now public a selection of more than one thousand pictures, with the most ancient pieces dating back to the 1840s and 1850s.

A coloured daguerreotype from the second half of the 1840s was published in the collection, that was realised in the study of Zsigmond Reisner. The collection also includes salted paper engravings, ambrotypes, panotypes and ferrotypes, and it’s also possible to view the portraits of the Egressy family, including Gábor Egressy and his sons’ daguerreotypes from the Museum of History of Theatre and Music and from The Manuscripts Library.

The photos were taken in the studies of József Borsos, Mór Erdélyi, Lajos Kawalky, Ferenc Kozmata, Jakab Marastoni, György Mayer, Ignác Schrecker, Antal Simonyi and Lipót Strelisky: the selection includes portraits of many important personalities of Hungarian history, such as Gyula Andrássy, Artúr Görgey, József Eötvös and Queen Erzsébet, and also Kézirattár’s collection of portraits of the Hungarian government, intellectual and economic élite of the 20s, from Strelisky’s photographic studio.

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