General information

Miksa Róth Memorial House
(Róth Miksa Emlékház)
1078 Budapest, Nefelejcs utca 26.

Phone: (0036- 1) 341 -6789
e-mail
hompage

Director: Tibor Fényi
e-mail

Opening hours:
between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m.,
Tickets can be bought until 5.30 p.m.

Closed on Monday!

 

 

Miksa Róth
Imperial and Royal court glass stainer artist
(1865-1944)

Miksa (Maximilian) Róth and his family lived in the building now housing the museum from 1910 until his death in 1944. The front building served as a dwelling house, while the three-storey building on the opposite side of the court -under reconstruction at the moment- gave home to the workshop where he together with 15-20 employees worked on the moasics and glass paintings. The furniture in the three rooms of the museum consists of the original furniture, carpets and antiquities of Miksa Róth. These pieces were donated by his daughters to the 7th district of Budapest on condition that the municipality will run a museum in their former dwelling house which was first used during the Second World War by the Germans and then by the Russians as a military industrial unit, and later for a while, during the period of communism, political officers of the Hungarian Army were trained here.

Miksa Róth attained the basis of glass staining from his father, and then, in his own separate studio opened in 1885, he laid the foundations of his own style following the patterns of early medieval glass painting traditions. It proved to be an opportune moment for him to begin his carreer in the arts: this was the period when the method of glass painting witnessed a great change by the resumption of producing and using the "antique glass" and the archaizing painting technique. Several of his early works and late writings prove that he consciously strived to perfectly acquire the mastery of medieval technique and style. In the first room, the copies of medieval French and German glass paintings are on display. By painting them, his main purpose was to study and later teach the style of old masters, since owing to the 150-year-long Turkish occupation no glass painting from the period remained intact in Hungary. In the same room, on the opposite side, his painted cabinet portraits corresponding to the style of the late 19th century are to be seen, which pictures bear testimony to his outstanding draughtsmanship and technical skill.

Miksa Róth was only but 22 years old when the opportunity of getting on the highway to success was opened up before him; he was commissioned to prepare the windows of the church of Máriafalva (now: Mariensdorf, Burgenland, Austria). The study glass (Mary with the child Jesus) prepared for the occasion is to be seen in the first room, and constitutes one of the museums most precious works of art. The significant breakthrough, however, for him was marked by the year 1896 when he won the competition for preparing the glass windows of the House of Parliament in Budapest. One year later he was the person due to whom preparing mosaic was established in Hungary. His mosaic works the Rising Sun and the Pax and Tree of Jesse exhibited in the mosaic room won him a silver medal at the Paris World Exhibition, 1900. In 1902 at the Turin World Exhibition and two years later at the St. Louis World Exhibition (USA) he was awarded Grand Prix. After the next two years at the Milan Exhibition of Applied Arts organized for the occasion of the opening ceremony of the Simplon tunnel, he was already a member of the international jury, in the company of Victor Horta.

Besides, in these years he was also engaged in preparing large-scale mosaics placed at public places. Just to mention a few from among the most famous ones: the monumental Patrona Hungariae mosaic on the facade of the former Turkish Bank House on Szervita Square, Budapest; the mosaic pictures on the sidewalls of Saint Stephen Basilica; the mosaic on the groundfloor of the Music Academy. He prepared the mosaic of the Holy Right niche in the Royal Castle Chapel too, which was demolished after the Second World War and reconstructed in Balatonalmádi.

Much though he achieved in making mosaics, it would be a mistake to believe that Róth gave up glass staining for the period of the turn of the century. On the contrary, he was the first to apply Tiffany-glass for glass windows in the Art Nouveau within the boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The glass panel titled Night Scene with Lilyoos, to be seen in the mosaic room, was one of his first stained-glass works in the Art Nouveau style. At this work of his, instead of painting on the glass he chose to place several layers of coloured glasses behind each other to reach the appropriate colour effect. The cabinet portraits (Girl's head, Kisfaludy-window, Sisters) prepared together with Sándor Nagy, the artist of the Gödöllő colony of artists producing works in the Art Nouveau style, and the fragment of a glass originally served as the glass window of the dining room of the palace of Count Tivadar Andrássy on the bank of the river Danube (unfortunately the palace was destroyed in World War II) are displayed in our glass painting room II. In the same room, the visitors can have a look at the Mosaic with Lambs, displaying texts from psalms made by golden sheets placed and burnt in between plates of glass, the technique of which was later taken out a patent on.

Already preceding the First World War, he became more and more acknowledged on a worldwide scale as well. Among many others, his works are to be seen in Venice (where he prepared the windows and mosaics of the separate Hungarian pavilion for the biennial festival - the windows have already been demolished), in Mexico where he prepared together with Géza Maróti the glass dome -1500 squarefeet in size- of the Teatro National, in the Fageborg church, Oslo, in the Royal Palace of the Netherlands, as well as in several towns of historic Hungary, like in the Cultural Palace of Marosvásárhely (Tirgu Mures, Rumania), in the chambers of the City Hall in Szabadka (Subotica, Yugoslavia) and in the Saint Michael Church of Kassa (Kosice, Slovakia).

Following the year 1920, he was given gradually less and less commissions due partly to the all-round economic depression of the period and partly to the declining popularity of Art Nouveau. His artistic creativity, however, did not at all decline, on the contrary, he prepared marvellous works also in the Art Deco style, which is proved by the works on display in our glass painting room II, that is, by the Art Deco Glass Door with Ribbon and, to its right, by the cabinet portraits depicting Hungarian Saints which were prepared for the Eucharistic World Congress of 1938, Budapest. Miksa Róth closed his workshop in 1940 and died four years later, in June, 1944.

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