Csók, István (1865-1961)

Similarly to the other young artists of his time, he studied at the academies of Budapest. Munich and Paris between 1882 - 1889. Hew painted his first great canvas. "Do This in Memory of Me (Holy Communion)" a year later, and "Orphans" was born in the next year. Both works scored a great success: he was awarded with a Gold Medal by the Paris Salon for the first one, and the second won him the Grand Prize of the Hungarian National Fine Art Society; both pictures were purchased by museums: the first by the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, the second by the Hungarian National Museum. Encouraged by the success of his exhibitions in Paris. Csók moved to the French capital in 1903. He lived there for seven years. After moving back to Budapest he depicted the city in numerous impressionistic paintings. These cityscapes and his nudes, portraits and landscapes of the Lake Balaton made him a distinguished artist, who was much celebrated all along his long career. His art was honored with several awards, among them the Kossuth Prize, which he won twice, he was a professor at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts; he had exhibitions in Roma (1914), San Francisco (1917), London (1922), Pittsburg (1926) and three large individual exhibitions in Budapest (1914, 1935, 1955).