My Father and Uncle Piacsek Drinking Red Wine

József Rippl-Rónai worked for more than a decade in France, where he grew familiar with the synthetic, decorative vernacular style that came after Impressionism. In the early 1900s he returned to Hungary and settled in Kaposvár. The interiors he painted there give us a glimpse into smalltown life and into his loving environment. The theme of this painting, showing the artist’s father and the elderly Uncle Piacsek, ranks it alongside his interiors. In its painterly style, however, it counts as the first piece made in what Rippl-Rónai called his “corn-style”. The two figures are placed firmly in the foreground, while the composition is fused into a single unit by the uniform yellow of the background and the intense reddish hue of the tablecloth. The emphasis on the characters’ facial features and the intricate detail of the objects hark back to the artist’s interior paintings from Kaposvár. Meanwhile, the more diffuse handling of the paint on the larger surfaces and the thick contour lines around the patches of pure colour are distinctive features of Rippl-Rónai’s “dotted” period.