The Hungarians were defeated in their revolt against the Habsburgs in 1848/49. A mainly agricultural country where the land was parceled into vast estates, Hungary was socially and economically behind Western Europe, which had implications for her art. Attempts to establish a national historical tradition culminated in the millennial celebration of the Magyar settlements in 1896, with great festivals and artworks. The discovery and inspiration of distinctive Hungarian landscapes and ethnic ways of life became great sources of motivation for Hungarian artists. Hungarian art became an amalgamation of two distinct directions, in keeping up with what the leading European art centres considered modern and interesting, but at the same time preserving their own distinctive appeal.

In 1896, the year of the millennial celebrations, an artists' colony was established in hilly eastern Hungary at the city of Nagybánya (now Baia Mare in Romania). This was followed by the Alföld group of artists of the Hungarian plains, who studied peasant life and the landscape of the county of Szolnok in particular. The Nagybánya painters grouped around the colony's initiator, Simon Hollósy. They worked in a variety of styles, from an almost transcendent realism a la Bastien-Lepage to a symbolist form of Art Nouveau, while always retaining an overriding interest in the homeland and its people.