[3] After being apprenticed to itinerant painter Elek Szamossy, Munkácsy went to Pest, the largest city in Hungary (now part of Budapest), where he sought the patronage of established artists.

After his Paris trip, his style became lighter, with broader brushstrokes and tonal colour schemes - he was probably influenced by modern French painting seen at the Exposition.

First he followed the colourful, theatrical style of contemporary Hungarian genre painters (e. g. Károly Lotz, János Jankó), for example in The Cauldron (1864) or Easter Merrymaking (1865).

From the Düsseldorf genre painters he learnt to represent different emotions in his figures and to treat them as a group (The Last Day of a Condemned Man, 1869).

It suggests torture caused by oppression, moral uncertainty and reactions to an impending tragic end in visual form.

He married the widow of Baron de Marches in 1874, after which his style evolved; departing from the typical subjects of realism, he produced colourful salon paintings and still lifes.

In the late 1870s he also worked in Barbizon, together with Paál, and painted fresh, richly coloured landscapes, such as Dusty Road, Corn Field, and Walking in the Woods.

In 1878, he painted a historical genre picture, The Blind Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to his Daughters, which marked a new milestone in his oeuvre.

The picture was bought (and successfully sold) by Austrian-born art dealer Charles Sedelmeyer, who offered Munkácsy a ten-year contract.

After Wanamaker's death they were exhibited in the Grand Court of his Philadelphia store every Easter, with special Lenten music programs often arranged around them.

His most often depicted subjects were motherhood (Baby's Visitors, 1879), the happy moments of domestic life (The Father's Birthday, 1882), children and animals (Two Families in the Salon, 1880).

Towards the end of his career he painted two monumental works: Hungarian Conquest for the House of Parliament, and a fresco, Apotheosis of Renaissance, for the ceiling of Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna.

Although Munkácsy, who was very conscious about earthly comfort and social prestige, became a celebrity, he was always unsure and always questioning his own talent.

Towards the end of his life when disease was demanding more and more of his energy and finally darkness descended on his mind, he completed two pictures involving several figures.

In one of them, Strike (1896), he illustrated the subject of the picture, rather unusual at his time, in a new style of character portrayal with the old passionate approach only superficially present.