Zsolnay Museum

The Zsolnay Museum is the permanent exhibition of the Janus Pannonius Museum, located in the oldest still standing residential house in Pécs, at Káptalan u. 2. The exhibition shows the factory's decorative works in chronological order, further grouped by stylistic trends and designers. Part of the exhibition is the Zsolnay memorial room, opened in 1990, which displays the Zsolnay family's furniture, furnishings and decorative objects, as well as paintings, drawings and photographs of family members.

History of the building

The first written record of the repeatedly rebuilt historic monument building dates from 1324. Renaissance fresco remnants can be seen on its façade. In 1477, György Handó, a provost, founded Hungary’s first public library in this building.

In 1844 Antal Piatsek rebuilt the building into its present form. In the 1930s it underwent a minor restoration, and then in 1955, before the exhibition moved in, a small alteration was made. After that, for fifty years no substantial modifications occurred; between 2005 and 2007 the building was fully restored.

Previously the building’s walls were decorated with frescoes, but during a renovation most of them faded. Since 2006, the probable image of the fresco is projected onto them in the evenings using two projection devices.

History of the exhibition

The collection of the Janus Pannonius Museum was founded by the Zsolnay collection of the City Museum of Pécs, which provides a historical overview of decorative art production and entered the collection in 1907 as a gift from Miklós Zsolnay. In 1928 the Zsolnay family founded a museum on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vilmos Zsolnay. This factory collection, numbering several thousand pieces, was nationalized together with the family’s study collection in 1948 and was entered into the Janus Pannonius Museum inventory from 1951. Architectural ceramics and drawings, execution plans made for the decorative works and documents related to the factory’s operation, certificates were added to the museum’s collection together with personal photographs and letters.

The factory was founded in 1853 by Miklós Zsolnay, a merchant from Pécs, for his son Ignác. The small manufactory, which then operated with only a few people, was taken over in 1865 by Vilmos Zsolnay, who in the early years dealt with technology development and material experiments. He achieved his first success at the 1873 Vienna World Exhibition, and the 1878 Paris World Exhibition brought international success to Vilmos Zsolnay. With his invention presented there, porcelain faience decorated with grain-pressed glaze, he won the gold medal of the exhibition and an honorific title from the French government.

In the last third of the 19th century, decorative ceramics were created in the spirit of historicism. The study and use of various historical style forms, cultures, and technologies played an important role in the formation of the concept of applied arts and in the artistic design of objects. Decorative vessels in the “Pannonia” style were made after the Bronze Age lime‑filled archaeological finds.

The “verde antique” decorative vessels got their name from their green glaze, also characteristic products of the 1870s. In these years Vilmos Zsolnay himself also designed. The cobalt‑drawn set made for Countess Degenfeld is certainly his work. From 1875 his daughters, Teréz and Júlia, also took part in the design work. They started as autodidacts, but quickly reached the artistic level of applied‑arts work. Teréz processed folk motifs and “noble embroidery” motifs, Júlia designed in an Orientalist style. She especially drew on Iznik (Ottoman‑Turkish) and Japanese forms. The Polish‑born Tádé Sikorski, Júlia Zsolnay’s husband, served the factory from 1883, and numerous artistically valuable designs are attributed to his name.

Vilmos Zsolnay in the 1890s developed his own reduced lustre technique, the so‑called eosin, based on the experimental results of Wartha Vince and Lajos Petrik. The eosin technique was presented at the 1896 National Millennium Exhibition, and the highly successful new technique inspired the emergence of the new style, Art Nouveau, in the factory. Independent plastic‑value, often symbolically meaningful decorative ceramics were made based on the designs of young applied artists, Sándor Apáti Abt, Henrik Darilek, Sándor Hidassy Pillo, Lajos Mack, Géza Nikelszky. When Vilmos Zsolnay died in 1900, the factory management was taken over by his son, Miklós Zsolnay. Around the 1910s the forms and technical execution of the decorative wares were simplified, and the production of small plastic items came to the fore.

The first World War ended the factory’s golden age. After the Treaty of Trianon they lost the overwhelming majority of their markets and raw material sources. Between the two world wars they mainly produced porcelain figures and decorative vessels painted under glaze, but in the mid‑1920s they also renovated the eosin technique, albeit in a simpler form.

From the late 1890s the economic basis of the factory was ensured by architectural ceramics, stove tiles and floor tiles, industrial porcelain, and later sanitary ware. The Zsolnay factory was nationalized in 1948. It still operates today under the name Zsolnay Porcelain Manufacture Ltd.