The Art of Courtship

Tihamér Margitay (1859–1922)

Tihamér Margitay was a 19th century Hungarian painter who specialized in so-called ‘parlour pictures’. These were genre paintings that depicted variations on the theme of courtly love. One of his stylistic motives was that of a man gently leaning over a chair to whisper something in a woman’s ear.

In Margitay’s paintings the women usually stand in the foreground, and there is almost something slightly menacing about the male figures. It suggests that there is always something both mildly comic and yet dangerous in the act of courtship. But the women aren’t simply being preyed on. They are aware of the game, and play their part in it. In most of Margitay’s paintings the women have a knowing smile. They are tolerating the advances by the somewhat hapless men. This lends the pictures a somewhat unusual quality, and to my mind makes them rise above mere genre portraits.

These images were essentially reworkings of parlour pictures from the 18th century. Consider, for example, the painting below, by the English artist John Opie.

The style is much more realist and classical. But what I like especially about this painting is that the woman looks a little bit fed up. Her expression reveals that she’s probably not very interested in this man’s advances.

Perhaps the problem is that these men are being just a little too obvious. As the author Lawrence Stern once observed, the art of courtship “consists in a number of quiet attentions, not so pointed as to alarm, nor so vague as not to be understood.”

These paintings depict that subtle quality, what one might call the liminal space between dejection and ascent, o, to put it in contemporary terms, rejection and consent.

Julian

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