Count János Waldstein-Wartenberg (b. 21 August, 1809, Nagymegyer (?), County Komárom - d. 3 June, 1876, Vienna), jurist, lord lieutenant [főispán] of Ung County (1861), amateur painter, and art collector, had developed good personal connections with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences before he was made a member of its Board of Directors on 26 March, 1868 [4, 5]. He was an intimate friend of Count István Széchenyi (1791-1860), one of the Academy's founders, and a keen supporter of the various cultural and economic projects initiated by him.

After he obtained doctoral degrees in philosophy and law in Pest [6], Waldstein entered state service to make his living and found employment as a public servant in Buda, Vienna, and Trieste. He left public office in 1849 and started a new career as art collector and patron - an occupation that better suited both his character and field of interest. In addition, he became involved in projects of railway construction and the improvement of the navigability of inland waterways [7].

Although Waldstein, whose Czech ancestors were naturalised in Hungary in 1758, had landed properties in three counties (Komárom, Veszprém, and Ung) [8], his participation in profitable enterprises like these reflected rather his patriotism than genuine economic interests. His patriotism was in a great part nurtured by his friendship with Széchenyi, with whose political ideas he later came to dissociate himself from but whose projects for the public good he never ceased to unequivocally support. It was in the course of a voyage on the lower Danube between 24 June and 19 October, 1830, that Waldstein first heard about these projects. Both men kept diaries which attest to the beginning of the warm friendship which grew up between them and continued, without either of them yielding to the other's political and ideological views, also in spite of abating personal contact until Széchenyi's suicide in the asylum in Döbling near Vienna on April 8, 1860. Waldstein saw his friend several times in Döbling and was among the few present at the performance of the last rites upon Széchenyi's corpse in the local parish church [9].

However, Waldstein's real field of interest was the visual arts. He was not only a patron but also an accomplished sketcher and gifted caricaturist. The Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books has several cartoons and illustrated letters by him [11]. One of these, entitled "Machen wir uns keine Illusion" [Do not deceive ourselves!] depicts Széchenyi as Royal Commissioner of the Regulation of the Lower Danube wading in the river at the Iron Gate Gorge with a bunch of steamships under his arms (K 293/3). An 1839 cartoon of Waldstein, another accomplished labour of love, portrays Széchenyi, author of the book "Pesti por és sár" [Dust and mud in Pest], as a street cleaner (K 293/4). His taste for refined style also comes out in the revision of Johann Nepomuk Ender's "Allegory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences" for the design of the seal of the Academy. As a member of the commission for the building of the Academy's palace he supported the neo-Renaissance design by Friedrich August Stüler (1800-1865) against the plans of a neo-Gothic building submitted by Imre Henszlmann (1818-1888), which was favoured by the Board of Directors. Hinting at Széchenyi's famous dictum, Waldstein argued that "even the stones used for the Academy's palace should themselves exclaim that Hungary will be reborn." [12] The building of the new palace he followed with great attention and showed special concern about the design of the future Academic Gallery [13].

Johann Thomas Ender and his twin brother Johann Nepomuk were born into a Silesian family in Vienna on 3 November, 1793. In 1806 both enrolled in the St-Anne Academy of Fine Arts. From 1810 Thomas studied under the renowned watercolourist Laurenz Janscha. It was here that he started to paint landscapes in the open air. In 1817 his landscapes won the Emperor's gold medal, which in turn earned him the patronage of Prince Metternich. In 1817-1818 he became a draughtsman of the Austrian scientific expedition that travelled to Brazil with the daughter of Emperor Francis I of Habsburg, Leopoldina, who married the crown prince of Brazil, Dom Pedro, the future King Pedro IV of Portugal. During his stay in Brazil, Thomas made hundreds of drawings and watercolours that are to be found in the collection of the Akademie der Künste in Vienna today. In 1832, he married Therese Árvay, daughter of an official of Buda castle. From 1837 we find Thomas in Vienna again as ordinary professor of landscape painting [19] but he often left the city for Italy and the course of the Danube.

Thomas Ender got to know Hungary more intimately as a companion of Archduke Johann of Austria on a voyage on the Danube from Vienna through Galaţi to Odessa in 1837. (Johann Ender made a similar journey with Széchenyi in 1818). It was also then that he became acquainted with the Hungarian companions of Archduke Johann, Count Festetics, Count Pongrácz, and Count Draskovich [20]. Their acquaintance probably proved to be of great help when he was travelling in Hungary in the early 1860s. The purpose of the Danube voyage was to depict famous sites on the banks of the river for the Hartleben Publishing House, which printed these landscapes as "Malerische Ansichten der Donau in Ungarn von Theben bis Golumbacz mit Darstellungen von R. Alt, Th. Ender und C. Klette" in Pest in 1838. Hartleben reprinted Ender's Danube landscapes as steel-engravings in a separate volume, "Die Wundermappe der Donau oder das Schönste und Merkwürdigste an den Ufern dieses Stromes von Ursprung bis zur Mündung" [A portfolio of wonders of the Danube or The most beautiful and noteworthy things along the banks of this watercourse from its headwaters to its delta] in 1839, which was reprinted in 1841. From these collections Franz Weidmann selected 23 landscapes by Ender for the aforementioned "Panorama der österreichischen Monarchie..." [Panorama of the Austrian Monarchy...] (first printed in 1839 and reprinted in 1840 and 1846) [21]. The "Panorama" was also published by Hartleben, who brought out a separate lithographic album of Ender's Hungarian landscapes, entitled "Magyarország festői mutatványokban" [Hungary artistically displayed], in Pest in 1844. In the next years Thomas made several study trips with his students to the Austrian Alps and South Tirol. In 1847 he went with Archduke Johann to Innsbruck and then to Northern Italy; it was the last time that the two travelled together [22]. In 1850 Thomas retired from the Academy on order of the Emperor. The nine-month journey he made to Italy in 1853 was in all probability a farewell gift from Archduke Johann [23].

We do not know anything about the beginning of Ender's relationship with János Waldstein. They most likely established personal contact by 1861, when the artist escorted his son, a railway engineer, to the construction site of the Košice-Oderberg railway [24]. Waldstein, who held shares in the railway construction company [25], had already a keen interest in Ender's paintings. The existence of relations between the two men is confirmed by landscapes that Ender painted in the Waldstein estate in Vinné (items 18.6-18.8), also by pictures of the Mihalovce mansion, which was owned by Waldstein's relatives, the Count Sztáray family (items 18.1-18.5) [26]. Landscapes of Užhorod (items 18.12-18.14) also seem to have been commissioned by Waldstein, who was appointed lord lieutenant of Ung County in 1861 [27]. The pictures of Count Manó Almássy's mansion in Parchovany (items 18.9-18.11) were probably made at the owner's request, too [28]. On his journey in Upper Hungary, Ender stayed for a while in the Mednyánszky mansion in Strážky (items 12.8-12.10). Here he made excursions to the High Tatras and found time for amending childhood drawings by László Mednyánszky (1852-1919), who was to become a renowned painter on his own right [29]. Watercolours now kept in the Albertina in Vienna and the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts bear witness to Ender's 1861-1863 visits to Transylvania, Gödöllő, and Lake Balaton [30]. In a letter to Miksa Falk (dated 14 November, 1869) Waldstein mentions that Ender was planning a trip to Transylvania [31] but, according to the confirmable facts of his life, he eventually did (or could) not make it.

The watercolours made by Ender in Upper and north-eastern Hungary are for the most part in the Waldstein Collection now [32]. The pictures of the Almássy mansion in Parchovany were displayed in an exhibition in Pest organised by the Hungarian Association of Arts between 15 September, 1863 and 20 January, 1864 [33]. Reproduction of pictures of castles by Ender was begun at the request of the Hungarian Monograph Society in 1914. The Society planned to publish the reproductions in an album illustrating the life in Hungarian castles, which however never made it to the printing office [34]. A third of the Waldstein Collection was first shown to the public at an exhibition by the Department of Graphic Arts of the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts in November, 1992 [35]. A small number of watercolours were also displayed as contemporary works of art at the exhibition of paintings by Károly Markó the Elder (1791-1860) in the Hungarian National Gallery in October-December, 1991 [36].

With a few exceptions, Ender's paintings in the Waldstein Collection are made in aquarelle technique on white paper. Still visible in many cases are the contours of human and animal figures, also some minutiae, which the artist sketched up in pencil but eventually left unpainted. In twenty-four cases, there are pencil drafts or incomplete watercolours on the verso as well. Items 11.1, 16.1 and 16.12 are unusually wide three-part panoramic landscapes. Each picture is mounted on a 500 × 657 mm cardboard backing. Backing 134 is empty, i.e., item 14.7 is missing. The collection is now kept in four large folders made specifically for that purpose and inscribed in guilt letters with "Waldstein János gr. a M. T. Academiának 1868" [Count János Waldstein to the H. Academy of S. 1868].

Although only two of the pictures (9.9 and 9.13) were actually signed by him, in the length of the lower edge of the paper the artist usually identified the landscape depicted. These German inscriptions are written in pencil (in German or Latin script) and often contain abbreviations. Frequently, details considered worthy of note (the name or the direction of a distant village, a far-off mountain peak or a valley, the owner of a castle or an estate etc.) are also indicated at the upper or lower edge of the picture. From the misspellings it appears that the foreign names he jotted down by hearing. Many of these inscriptions got mutilated when the papers were trimmed but some of them were later rewritten, by the artist himself or someone else, above or below the mutilated lines.

(Kinga Körmendy - Júlia Szabó - Béla Rozsondai)