Alajos Strobl

Self portrait 1878

(21 June 1856, Liptovský Hrádok/Liptóújvár-13 December 1926, Budapest)sculptor

He studied in Vienna between 1876 and 1880. His talent was obvious even very early on; he received his first acknowledgement in 1882 for his statue Perseus. He made two statues for the facade of the newly built Opera House (Operaház), and sitting figures of the musicians Ferenc Erkel and Ferenc Liszt at the entrance. From this moment on he became the most popular monument sculptor and the leading figure in Hungarian sculpture at the turn of the 19th century.

Strobl's works include the memorial statue of János Arany (Arany János emlékszobra, 1893) in the garden of the Hungarian National Museum (Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum), the Matthias well (Mátyás-kút, 1904) erected in the Buda Castle (Budai vár), the statue of St Stephen (Szent István-szobor, 1906) on the Fisherman's Bastion (Halászbástya), and the joint preparation with Kálmán Gerster of the ornamentation of the Kossuth mausoleum in the Fiumei út Cemetery (Fiumei úti temető). The War Memorial in Stansted, UK, was originally created as the apotheosis of painter Károly Lotz.

As well as his typically 19th-century memorial-style works, he also created several Impressionist portraits. He received numerous prizes both in Hungary and abroad in recognition of his work and was a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts (Képzőművészeti Főiskola) for decades.