Tivadar Csontváry Mini-Sculpture

Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka left exactly one boast about his schooldays in Ungvár: he studied very little, by his own admission, but no one in town could beat him on skates. Mykhailo Kolodko read that sentence and took it literally. On the embankment railing beside the pedestrian bridge, a bronze figure the length of a finger leans hard into a turn, arms out for balance, a paintbrush in one hand.

The pharmacist who heard a voice

He was born in 1853 in Kisszeben — Sabinov, in today's Slovakia — into a Ruthenian-Slovak family, and grew up partly at Szerednye, some twenty kilometres from Uzhhorod, which is how he came to be schooled in the town on the Uzh. He trained as a pharmacist and spent years behind a counter.

Then, on 13 October 1880, aged twenty-seven, he wrote down that a voice had told him he would be the greatest painter in the world, greater than Raphael. He did not walk out that afternoon. He stayed in pharmacy for another decade to build up savings, and only in 1894, at forty-one, declared himself a painter. Everything he is remembered for — Ruins of the Greek Theatre at Taormina, Pilgrimage to the Cedars in Lebanon, The Lonely Cedar — came between 1903 and 1909, in his fifties.

Applauded in Paris, ignored at home

Abroad the canvases landed. He exhibited in Paris in 1907 and Western critics took him seriously. In Hungary he was filed under crank — a vegetarian, a pacifist, a self-taught man who published his own peculiar pamphlets — and he died in Budapest in 1919 having sold almost nothing.

The reversal came afterwards and went a long way. Since 1973 the largest collection of his work has had a museum to itself in Pécs, and in Transcarpathia he is spoken of as the local Van Gogh: the huge, sun-saturated canvases invite the comparison, and so does the life.

Why skates, and why this railing

Part of the ironwork by the bridge survives from the years Csontváry knew the place. In winter the Uzh beneath it froze hard and became the town rink — the one thing, on his own account, he was the best at. The figure is not simply standing at a good view of the river; it stands over the ice.

The pose does double work. A man leaning into his speed, out in front of everyone else on the rink, carrying a paintbrush: that is about as much of this particular career as a palm-sized bronze can be asked to carry.

Finding him

Kolodko unveiled the piece on 10 March 2016 and it was shifted to its current spot on the railing on 5 July 2023, the painter's 170th birthday. Look along Pravoslavna naberezhna a few metres from the pedestrian bridge, at the older section of the railing, and expect to overshoot him at least once — he is small, dark, and sits at railing height among a lot of identical ironwork.

Kolodko has lived in Budapest for some years now and has been quietly seeding that city as well, but the Uzh embankment is where the density is highest. An unhurried hour along the water will turn up half a dozen of them.