The presentation focuses on Hungary's first state art education institution. The school is the nearly 250-year-old Secondary School of Visual Arts. In the 19th century, the institution operated as a drawing school providing training for craftsmen, and at the beginning of the 20th century, workshop teaching was introduced. From then on, drawing training and design were complemented by execution, and the school offered increasingly complex art education. The lecture examines the work of the very first art classes at the school through the Schola Graphidis Art Collection, a collection of artworks used and created during the course of education that has been preserved at the school. The museum-quality art collection, preserved in the school environment and still used in teaching today, includes a collection of photographs of historical value. These student works, created in the photography department founded in 1914, continuously documented school life, the work going on in the workshops, and student exhibitions. With the help of photographs supplementing written sources, we sought answers to the following questions: 1. What international influences shaped the development of the first secondary art education in Hungary? 2. Are guild traditions and the tradition of the drawing school function still valid, and if so, to what extent? 3. How did the institution's art collection, which was constantly expanding with student works, determine the work going on at the school and how did it define the institution itself?

Following a deductive, qualitative paradigm, this idiographic study examines the beginnings of secondary art education in Hungary by processing primary written and visual sources. Due to the subject matter and sources of the research, our study is a synchronic examination that also includes diachronic elements, in which we approach the characteristics of art education with the help of primary sources and through student work. In processing the written primary sources (archival sources, school periodicals), we examined phenomena related to the institution's operation, specific character, and pedagogical practice through historical source analysis and approached them through discursive analysis of the texts. The primary written documents were supplemented by the analysis of visual sources, in which the historical context was determined by exploring cultural codes and identifying the social and artistic environment through the interpretation of visual sources.

In examining the above questions, our main analytical perspectives are: the examination of reception effects, the analysis of the continuing traditions of guild-based drawing instruction, and the characteristics of current art education as it has developed from workshop-based instruction. The expected outcome and benefit of the analysis is to paint a more accurate picture of the characteristics and roots of secondary art education in Hungary in the 19th and 20th centuries. Our results indicate that art education, which developed within the framework of traditional training and applied modern 20th-century educational principles, retains many traditional elements. The art collection, which is still used in educational work today, contributes to the institution's self-representation.

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