Munkácsy's Yawning Apprentice pill box

Mihály Munkácsy’s painting titled Yawning Apprentice – or more precisely a head study of a yawning apprentice – is one of the best known works of Hungarian painting. Perhaps it is the only painting in the 19th-century Hungarian art that depicts such anordinary and even unseemly subject. It shows the face of a yawning young man in an almost embarrassing close-up. Munkácsy painted a full-length depiction of the same yawning apprentice. It is interesting that the master’s studies, focusing on a face or figure, are more expressive that the final, detailed compositions they were made for. This head study with a distinct character also reveals more about the protagonist’s apprenticeship than the completed full-length composition, which provides a genre-like depiction of the hard-working apprentice who is shown getting out of bed, stretching. The study here focuses more on the face and captures the otherwise ordinary scene even better.