Arrived at the Viennese Academy in 1865, and then studied in Munich from 1866, first at the Academy, and then, following a trip to Paris, at a private school. He worked in Düsseldorf between 1868 and 1971, this is where his special primer of bitumen was developed.He lived in Paris from 1871, and French criticism acclaimed his pieces. He worked with a friend of his youth László Paál in Barbison in 1873; in the colony he also met millet. Following his marriage a turn in his life of art also came about. The celebrated artist, whose significance and artistic accomplishments were already compared with those of Franz Liszt signed a contract with the art merchant Hans Sedelmayer. His series of salon pictures dealing with the sparkling and intimate scenes of representative and worldly life took off around 1876. His style for landscape painting grew to full maturity in the 1880s. His studio- school in Paris was visited by Hungarian. German and American students between 1877 and 1880, and he founded a prize that provided for the training of young artists in Paris in 1882. He completed the panorama that serves as the ceiling decoration of the stairway of the Kunsthistorisches Museum entitled the Apotheoses of the Renaissance in 1884. The "Hungarian conquest" (1894) painted in the Parliament under construction counts among his works on historical themes.