In 1870 the journal Képes Világ published an atypical drawing depicting a Roma figure: an old musician whose noble figure appeared as a historical-mythological allegory. The reason for the uncommon representation was the special status of the drawing, which was published as the illustration to one of the most important texts in the Hungarian literature of Romanticism, Mihály Vörösmarty’s poem, ‘The Old Gypsy’. In this text, the ‘old Gypsy’ becomes the image of the poetic self, but his figure also remains in the role of the outsider, the Other, whose music projects the sorrow of the lost hopes of Hungarian nationalism. Not long after this publication, in the same year József Kiss became the chief editor of the journal. The oeuvre of Kiss marked the beginning of literary modernism in Hungarian literature, and it also marked the emergence of modern Jewish literature. After the atypical drawing of the old Roma musician, the journal’s practice of representing the Roma was no different from the general practices of the era, but its practices of representing Jews went through a significant change. This enables us to compare the othering and assimilating modes of representation in the genre of magazine illustrations in the 1870s.