Soma Orlai Petrich
Portrait in 1878
Born	(1822-10-22)October 22, 1822 Mezobereny, Poland
Died	June 5, 1880(1880-06-05) (aged 57) Budapest
Resting place	Kerepes Cemetery, Budapest
Style	Historical Scenes, Portraits

Soma Orlai Petrich, aka Soma Orlay-Petrich (October 22, 1822, Mezőberény - June 5, 1880, Budapest) was a Hungarian painter famous for his historical paintings and portraits. ^[1]

He born to a staunchly evangelical Serbian father and Hungarian mother Karolina Salkovics (whose portrait is one of his best known works) in the highland border town of Mezőberény. He studied in Sarvas, Croatia and Sopron before taking a law degree in Pápa Reformed College. There, he studied with his second cousin, national hero and poet Sándor Petőfi, and the two travelled together widely. After painting his cousin's parents, Petrich's obvious talent caused him to abandon his original dream of becoming a writer, and he began studying at Jakab Marastoni art school in 1846, then attended Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller's school in Vienna beginning in 1847, Wilhelm von Kaulbach in Munich in 1850, and also took instruction in Rome and Paris.

He often painted historical themes and in his lithographs he portrayed experiences during the war of independence. Arguably his most famous painting, "The Discovery of Louis II [of Hungary]'s Body" (1851) inspired others to paint on the same subject, including Bertalan Székely a decade later.

He was also a popular portraitist, and made a good living in Debrecen and Vienna before settling in Pest following the founding of its permanent collection. By 1861, he was on the board of directors of the National Hungarian Society of Fine Arts with Miklós Barabás, Jenő Zichy, and Than Mór. ^[2] Though he suffered from seizures his whole life, he produced at least one major work from 1851 until Coriolanus in 1869.

Selected Works

References

External links

• Artcyclopedia Entry
• Media related to Soma Orlai Petrich at Wikimedia Commons

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Hungarian. (February 2011) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Hungarian article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Hungarian Wikipedia article at [[:hu:Orlai Petrich Soma]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|hu|Orlai Petrich Soma}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

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