Ervin Bossányi was born to a Hungarian Jewish family in 1891 in Regőce, Austria-Hungary (now Ridica, Serbia) and studied at the School of Applied Art, Budapest and at the Académie Julian, Paris. Following Hitler's rise to power and fearing racial persecution, he moved to England in 1934, where he received most of his best-known commissions in stained glass, including four windows for Canterbury Cathedral, with other major works in York Minster, and Senate House Library, University of London.
Painter, sculptor and stained glass artist Ervin Bossányi was born to a Hungarian Jewish family in 1891 in Regőce, Austria-Hungary (now Ridica, Serbia), but grew up in Baja. Subsequently, Bossányi studied at the School of Applied Arts, Budapest and was awarded a travelling scholarship, which he used to study variously in Rome, at Camden School of Art in London, and at the Académie Julian, Paris between 1910–13. A year after finishing his studies, he returned to the French capital to establish himself as a professional artist. During the First World War, Bossányi was interned as an 'enemy alien' in Brittany and Normandy in 1915. Twelve of his small watercolours created during his internment in Brieuc are held by the Prints and Drawings Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. On his release in 1919, Bossányi resettled in Germany, first in Hamburg (in June) and then in Lübeck (in October of the same year), as he could not return to Hungary due to the rise of fascism under Regent Horthy. During this time, he became a successful artist and created outdoor sculptures and received stained glass commissions, which included windows for the Technical and Arts and Crafts College in Lübeck and 37 windows for the new Hamburg Crematorium. He also designed furniture and hanging carpets to make a living between commissions. In 1921, he married Wilma Maasz, a pianist, with whom he had a son, Jo in 1924. The relationship between mother and son became a recurring theme throughout his career, as he believed that a mother's love was unselfish, symbolising the very core of human goodness. The family moved from Lübeck back to Hamburg in late 1929.
Following Hitler's accession to chancellorship and the Nazi Party's rise to power, Bossányi moved to England in 1934, where he began to focus on stained glass and painting, rather than sculpting. He was soon noticed by fellow Hungarian, Rózsika Rothschild, who became his patron. In 1935 he exhibited a farmyard scene at the Annual Exhibition of Jewish Artists at the Ben Uri Art Gallery and held a solo show Stained Glass & Paintings by E. Bossanyi at the Beaux-Arts Gallery, London. Some of Bossányi's first stained glass commissions in England were for Goldsmiths' Library, Senate House, University of London and for the new Uxbridge underground station. Though not incarcerated himself during the Second World War, many of Bossányi’s relatives perished in concentration camps in Europe, the trauma of which strongly influenced his later works. During the 1940s, he started to experiment with new types of glass-painting pigments and was commissioned by the company Johnson Matthey (which had taken over the specialist paint manufacturer, Hancocks, and the Whitefriars Glassworks) to make a glass panel using these materials, which resulted in Noli Me Tangere (1946), now on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He made the panel after learning that his 93-year-old mother had perished in Auschwitz, and filled the piece with 'the symbols of motherly and filial love, the building of the family home and the deep relationship between the human child and all beauty and grace nature produces and which must not be hurt or destroyed' (as cited on V&A website). In 1956–60 Bossányi designed and installed four stained glass windows into the south-eastern transept of Canterbury Cathedral in Kent. The two larger windows, Peace and Salvation, incorporate Bossányi’s personal reflections on ideas of imprisonment and freedom based on his experiences in the two World Wars. Bossányi’s final commission was a stained glass window in York Minster (1974–75); the installation was still in progress at the time of his death.
Bossanyi's international projects include windows for Washington National Cathedral in the USA and for Michaelhouse Chapel in South Africa. In England Bossányi’s stained glass work can be found in the collections of the Stained Glass Museum in Ely and Tate Britain, while others are held in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and in private collections. Additionally, his son donated a portion of Bossányi’s collection of traditional Hungarian clothing and textiles to the British Museum; he also gifted two of Bossanyi's drawings of Heligoland from the 1920s to Millport, Glasgow University's Marine Biological Station (where Jo was a member of staff) to mark the centenary of the Station; these works are now located in Senate House, University of London, as part of the University's art collection.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Ervin Bossanyi]
Publications related to [Ervin Bossanyi] in the Ben Uri Library