The concept may sound hackneyed, but burnout is a danger that may beset any occupation or any situation in life. Is this a characteristic of a high-buzz age in constant overdrive, or do we simply see more of each other’s lives and talk more courageously about our difficulties? The answer to this question comes from an unexpected place, directly from the Hungarian painter Mihály Munkácsy.

Mihály Munkácsy was still a child when his life turned from idyllic to nightmarish, losing first his mother and then his father. Although he was born into the age of the cult of genius, he never tried to hide the fact that he did not excel at school, and it was precisely because of his poor academic performance that his uncle steered him towards the trades.

At the age of eleven, Munkácsy was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker, becoming exposed to the most extreme forms of privation, defencelessness and exploitation. We know from his memoirs that he worked 12 hours a day, was always hungry, and was regularly maltreated by fellow apprentices and his master. Though in 1858 he was employed as a journeyman, he continued to live in poverty, and in 1861, famished and ill, he returned to his uncle. He spent his recuperation period drawing, and the exercise helped heal both his spirit and body. Four years later he enrolled at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts.

Albeit through peaks and troughs, Munkácsy’s career was rising from this point on, but the childhood memory of mental and physical overexertion – which, let us be honest, was very common at the time – continued to haunt him for a long time. What he gained from his great model Courbet and Realism was above all an outlook, a means to visualize human struggle in everyday life without the monumentality and heroic sheen of classical Romanticism. The paintings of his magnum opus, the Christ Trilogy, show the fall of Jesus in his earthly life, while his works from the 1860s and early 1870s portray the daily downfall of man banished from Eden.

One of Munkácsy's best-known painting, the Yawning Apprentice, comes to life in the production of Háromszék Dance Theatre © Kátai Jocó

Now one of his best-known works, the Yawning Apprentice, painted in 1869 during his Düsseldorf years, was the first painting that earned him more widespread professional recognition; the way the moment is captured is perfect, the execution is anatomically superb, and most importantly, it is charged with a great deal of empathy. Rudely awoken from his sleep, the young apprentice could even be comical with a gesture that looks like an exaggerated dance move. His surroundings, however, are not suffused with serenity; the dark, sombre tones and the evident hopelessness of the situation make this a veritable monument to burnout. The setting is as reminiscent of the everyday toil of agricultural workers as of drudgery in the age of industrialization.

Though brighter and more colourful, the subject of Woman Carrying Faggot makes it closely related to Yawning Apprentice. While the model is described as a “woman,” leaving her age unspecified, this is a young woman who has sunk down to rest in a state of complete physical and mental exhaustion. Churning Woman goes even further: the weary gaze of the old woman, which is unlikely to inspire hope, is counterpointed by the posture and expression of the little girl, both curious and disappointed. It is not difficult to see how the sensitive approach to the two subjects was informed by the artist’s personal experience.

Though Munkácsy was probably not familiar with the concept of ”burnout,” he was fully aware of how endless drudgery wrecks physical and mental health. How can we today follow the painter’s suit and empathize with the hardships of peasants? How did the apathy represented in these pictures go on to inform the crowds in the Christ Trilogy, and how do they reveal enduring human qualities? These were among the questions that interested choreographer Tamás Farkas and director Ernő Tapasztó when they set out to bring to life Munkácsy’s most famous paintings with the help of the Háromszék Dance Theatre. More than a series of tableaux vivants, this production explores how we can connect to these towering achievements in Hungarian and European art history, which may be distant in time but are very contemporary in their subject matter.