A typical representative of monumental painting on national subject matters. He went to Vienna to learn there. He revived monumental fresco painting and its subject matters in Hungarian art.
After trips to Russia and Paris, he settled down in Pest. Nyári and Petry's Arrest (1857), a picture with free dynamism painted while he was still abroad, was the first really romantic picture of Hungarian art. Violent gestures and power present do not appear in his other works any more, e.g. Recruiting before 1848 which can be classified as a critical realist picture because of subject matter and approach. Historic pictures of the 1860s represented a bravery but their style became more and more academic, and their messages drier and drier (The Diet at Ónod, King Emeric Captures His Insurgent Brother, Andrew). He wants to remind the spectator not only of the tragedy of the war of independence, but the power of unity, too.
The grandiose composition is present especially in his frescoes which he produced between 1860 and 1880 to decorate the Municipal Concert Hall and the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest. In the Concert Hall the fresco Feast of Attila (destroyed in World War II) should be mentioned. He decorated the staircase of the Hungarian National Museum in collaboration with Károly Lotz whose work received a more favourable response than that of Than's. Than therefore left for Italy from where he returned in 1890 to become secretary of the Society for Fine Arts. After his very promising early years his oeuvre can be considered as somewhat incomplete.
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