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István Szőnyi began his studies in 1913 in the class of Károly Ferenczy at the College of Fine Arts. Ferenczy, as the founding master of the Nagybánya Artists' Centre, took his students to Nagybánya in the summer of 1914. The students made a lively impression there. Szőnyi painted and drew dynamic, expressive landscapes at that time, with nudes set in landscapes, but he also embraced the heritage of Nagybánya. He tried to reconcile avant-garde distortion with classical composition. Few of his early paintings have survived. The museum preserves some of his canvases painted in the nineteen-twenties. He used the oil technique at this time, often applying paint thickly, as in Brickworks Valley, but there are also loosely resolved compositions, including Lucy Egyedi's Portrait from 1919.
Among the first scholarship holders of the Hungarian Academy of Rome, founded in 1928, he spent a few months in the Eternal City. After his return home, a change of style can be observed in his work. This period is characterised by a harder, drier style of painting, a more graphic structure, but at the same time his palette becomes lighter. He used a new technique, tempera, and became increasingly interested in the effect of light on colour. Among his paintings from his transitional period, Family (Mother with Children), Dogs in the Stone, and Street in Zebegény are in the museum.
In 1934 he painted his Evening, an important piece in the permanent exhibition of the Hungarian National Gallery. This painting can be seen as the beginning of a new era. He experimented with a new emulsion for tempera painting, the recipe for which he published in the 1941 volume The School of Fine Art. The museum's tempera paintings Garden Bench and The Village in Autumn are some of the finest works of Szőnyi's mature period.
Szőnyi painted very few watercolours, yet his best known and most beautiful work is perhaps his Danube Bend, painted in 1923. From the 1930s onwards, he preferred the pure gouache technique, capturing on numerous small sheets the house in Zebegény, the objects seen around the house, the animals, the village, the events in the village and the wonderful panorama of the Danube Bend.
Gouache is technically between watercolour and tempera, it is also water-soluble, but is used as a dense opaque paint. Interesting effects can be achieved by washing the surface covered with the opaque colour with a damp brush, as the opaque colour is not absorbed into the paper fabric due to its dense consistency and therefore dissolves easily. She washed the composition with a diluted solution of Chinese ink and then wiped the started composition with absorbent paper, creating very fine, special factures on the surface of the painting.
In Szőnyi's oeuvre, reproduction graphics were not simply an accompanying genre to his panel paintings, but much more than that. Lajos Németh, an eminent art historian of the period, claimed that the graphic tradition in Hungary was created by painters and sculptors until the 1940s. István Szőnyi also played a significant role in the creation of the aforementioned graphic traditions. He started to work in etching in the early 1920s. He never studied the intricacies of the technique at school, but acquired his skills on his own, studying the works of Rembrandt and Dürer. His great oeuvre of more than 200 plates was produced between 1920 and 1936, and later he rarely took up the etching needle. The museum's collection includes almost all of his plates and sheets. The 100-sheet etching album, a highly prized item in the collection, was assembled by him from original prints made in the 1950s. This was the model for the publication of the volume entitled The Etchings of the Graphic Artist István Szőnyi by Rózsa Köpöczi Rózsa Köpöczi in 2000, which was published by the Szőnyi Foundation in collaboration with the Pest County Museums Directorate.
István Szőnyi left behind a rich graphic oeuvre. A significant part of it can be found in the museum's collection. There are several beautiful sheets of nude studies and composition sketches from the nineteen-twenties, which are reminiscent of the college days. After his move to Zebegény, we can talk about a stream of drawings, almost every time and situation he put on paper what he saw. He rarely worked from model, often looking out of the window, sitting on the train, watching the street, capturing the figures of characterful people standing and talking. During the summers in Zebegény, he went out every day to his garden on the banks of the Danube to "collect". He carefully preserved his drawings, grouped them in folders, so that he could always retrieve the motifs he had collected while painting his panels. The museum's collection also includes a significant collection of his large-scale sketches and designs for commissions he received in the 1940s.
The collection is full of curiosities. Among its pieces is a small drawing, later proven to be the work of Mihály Munkácsy, modelled on Jolán Szulimán, the grandmother of Melinda Bartóky, Szőnyi's wife. The small drawing was preserved for generations and became a treasured part of the family legacy. The collection also includes a beautiful drawing by László Mednyánszky, a watercolour by Bertalan Székely and a chalk drawing by Károly Lotz. Between the two world wars, artist friends visiting Zebegény also gave Szőnyi a number of prints and paintings. Thus, watercolours by Jenő Elekfy, prints by József Egry, Noémi Ferenczy, Róbert Berény, János Kmetty, Pál Molnár C., Károly Patkó, Imre Szobotka, Károly Koffán can all be found in the museum's storage. The collection also includes works by many of Szőnyi's students. As part of the permanent exhibition, in the living room there is a bronze statue of Pál Pátzay's Standing Boy and a ceramic sculpture of Margit Kovács' Girl with a Jug.
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