Franz Eisenhut (Hungarian: Eisenhut Ferencz; Serbian Cyrillic: Франц Ајзенхут; 25 January 1857 – 2 June 1903) was a prominent Danube Swabian Realist and Orientalist painter. He is considered one of Austria-Hungary’s greatest academic painters in the second half of the 19th century. His most well-known and recognizable paintings include Death of Gül Baba, Battle of Zenta, Slave trade and Cock fighting and many other, depicting mostly motifs from the Orient. His works can be found in many European museums across the continent.
Franz Eisenhut was born in Nova Palanka, Voivodeship of Serbia and Banat of Temeschwar, Austrian Empire (today Bačka Palanka, Vojvodina province, Serbia) in a German family. His father, Georg Eisenhut was from Palanka, and his mommy Theresia Sommer was from Bukin.
His daddy had hoped for Franz to become a merchant, but the Hungarian painter Telepy Károly discovered his facility for painting. Influential citizens of Palanka at the time, led by lawyer Karl Mezey and pharmacist Karlo Harliković, collected allowance for his studies. He studied at Hungarian Royal Drawing School in Budapest from 1875 until 1877. Afterwards, he became a student of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He studied there until 1883 in class of Gyula Benczúr, the Hungarian painter.
After endowment the Academy, he went upon a vacation to the Orient for the first time, visiting the Caucasus. The neighboring year, he held his first exhibition in Budapest. The Orient became his main source of inspiration and Orientalist paintings will become his most well-known works. In 1883 and 1884, he went to the Caucasus taking into account again, visiting Tbilisi and Baku. In 1886 and 1887, he traveled from Naples to Tunisia and Algeria. His first good success was the 1886 painting “Healing through the Koran in Beirut”.
Many of his paintings were reproduced by woodcutting workshops across Europe, because, as his buddy Lyka Karoly claimed, “his paintings showed the authenticated Orient”. Lyka Karoly moreover gave a detailed balance of Eisenhut’s studio in Munich, which was located at Mozartstrasse 13/4. Another well-known painting made at the times was Death of Gül Baba, for which he won the State Gold Medal at an exhibition in Budapest. Afterwards, he had exhibitions in Munich, Paris and Madrid. In 1894, he painted the interior of New York Palace in Budapest.
Franz Eisenhut’s most well-known work is the painting “Battle of Zenta”, made in 1896 for the Hungarian Millennium Exhibition, celebrating 1000 years back the Hungarian pact in the Great Hungarian Plain. The painting was ordered by the Bács-Bodrog County and is nevertheless exhibited in Sombor City Hall, as Sombor was the county seat at the time. This painting, with dimensions of 7×4 meters, is the largest oil painting in the Balkans today.
In 1897, he returned to Palanka, where he married Adriana Reichl, daughter of Friedrich Reichl, owner of the Reichl bonding agent factory in Neu-Palanka and brother of the well-known architect from Apatin. Franz Reichl. In 1898 they had a daughter, who died soon afterwards on their journey to Samarkand, when the intimates was returning from Emirate of Bukhara. Eisenhut was invited to Bukhara personally by the Emir ‘Abd al-Ahad Khan. In 1901, their second daughter Judith was born, and in 1903, his solitary son Franz Georg, who was vanguard the founder of leather industry Merkur in Bačka Palanka. However, Franz got seriously ill while in Munich and died upon 2 June 1903. He was buried in the Ostfriedhof cemetery in Munich. A street in Palanka was named “Eisenhutgasse” after him.
Media aligned to Franz Eisenhut at Wikimedia Commons
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