The tomb monument of Ilona Krajcsovits may be regarded as Bory Jenő’s earliest known funerary work, already displaying the formal and emotional motifs that would also characterise his later funerary sculpture.
The tomb monument of Ilona Krajcsovits occupies a special place in Bory Jenő’s oeuvre. On a photograph preserved in the artist’s estate, he wrote in his own hand: ‘the very first, 1906’.
The central element of the monument is a seated allegorical female figure, appearing as the personification of mourning and remembrance. The composition already anticipates the world of Bory’s later tomb monuments, in which allegorical figures often express ideas of loss, grief or commemoration in place of direct portraiture.
One point of particular interest is that the work’s present location is unknown. Its existence is known to the specialist literature solely from the photograph preserved in the Bory estate, and it is therefore uncertain in which cemetery it stood or whether it survives today.