A tiny detail of a picture taken of the pantry provides a basis for dating the photographs made of the completed and furnished villa.

In the previous installment of the Villa Journal, we reported about whether it could be determined when the family moved into their Bajza Street home from an interview with Rózsi Walter. The house was photographed on several occasions by noted Hungarian photographers Olga Máté, Ferenc Haár, and Zoltán Seidner. Seidner recorded nearly every room of the villa. He took pictures of the pantry cabinet in the housekeeper’s apartment on the ground floor when it was both open and closed. It is not only the pots and pans, glass jars, sliced apples, and crackers that can be seen lined up on the shelves, but also the newspapers used to line them. It is possible to see the upside-down masthead from the 18 November 1936 issue of the Esti Kurír (Evening Courier) on one of these sheets of newspaper with the name of its editor in chief Károly Rassay. We noticed this tiny detail, which cannot be seen with the naked eye, when making a high-resolution scan of the original glass negative. From this, it was possible to establish that Seidner’s series of photographs, some of which appeared in the January 1937 issue of the architectural journal Tér és Forma (Space and Form), were taken after the 18th of November 1936.

Fanni Izabella Magyaróvári