Baron Béla Lipthay de Kisfalud et Lubelle

Biography of Béla Baron Lipthay de Kisfalud et Lubelle *1827 +1899
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Baron Béla Lipthay de Kisfalud et Lubelle was born in Pest on 27 January 1827, the son of Baron Frigyes Lipthay de Kisfalud et Lubelle and of Karolina Csekonics, daughter of the famous General József Csekonics. He studied in Temesvár, Szeged, and Pest, where he graduated in Law. During the war for independence in 1848-49, he served as a first lieutenant. In the winter campaign, he was severely wounded, and one of his hands remained permanently paralyzed. At the end of the conflict, he attended the surrender in Világos of the forces fighting for independence. After the defeat, he remained for more than a decade on the family estate in Lovrin, Torontal.

In the 1860s he returned to public life, first as head of his county, then as elected member of the Hungarian Parliament. From 1867 he was governor of the county of Baranya, then of Pest until his resignation in 1869. In these years the first mortgage bank was created under his chairmanship. He held his parliamentary seat during several terms as a devoted follower of the Deák’s party (the supporters of Ferenc Deák, the architect of The Compromise of 1867, but after the party joined with the moderate left party of Kálmán Tisza in 1875 he abandoned the coalition, faithful to his liberal democratic creed.

In 1886 he was registered among the peers of Hungary, partly in recognition of his manifold activities in public and cultural life. Baron Béla Lipthay was listed among those who paid the largest amounts of tax. He played a key role in public life, leading development initiatives of the capital: he was vice-chairman of the Committee of Public Works, in charge of the development projects of Budapest. He was part of the board supervising the construction of the Hungarian Parliament now in place. He also participated in societies promoting cultural values, as the Circle of Patrons of Arts, the Society for Applied Arts, and the Society of Creative Arts. He was chairman of the foundation committee of the National Theatre.

Baron Béla Lipthay was a dedicated and constant collector of art throughout his life and sponsored Hungarian artistic talent. The pieces he collected – valuable furniture, porcelain and ceramics, mainly Zsolnay – were displayed in the Lipthay Palace built in the second half of the 19th century by Emil Unger and Miklós Ybl. Highly valuable frescos painted by Gyula Benczúr and Károly Lotz decorated the most important halls of the magnificent residence Baron Béla had built for the Lipthay family. After Baron Béla Lipthay’s death, his widow baroness Amalia Lipthay, born von Mack, donated the most important pieces of their collection to the Museum of Applied Arts of Hungary.

Baron Béla Lipthay died in 1899, just before Hungary’s international significance began to fade. He did not imagine that only 50 years after his passing the palace he had built would be demolished, after the dictates of a communist regime committed to destroying the treasures built up in a thousand years of Hungarian cultural identity.

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