Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel was a German Realist artist noted for drawings, etchings, and paintings. Along with Caspar David Friedrich, he is considered one of the two most prominent German painters of the 19th century, and was the most successful artist of his era in Germany. First known as Adolph Menzel, he was knighted in 1898 and changed his name to Adolph von Menzel.
Paintings by Adolph Menzel
Frederick the Great Playing the Flute at Sanssouci (1852)
Frederick the Great Playing the Flute at Sanssouci or The Flute Concert is an 1852 oil on canvas history painting by the German painter Adolph Menzel. It depicts Frederick the Great, King of Prussia playing the flute at an evening concert at Sanssouci and is now in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
Menzel was one of the most popular and important Realist painters of the 19th century, and was ennobled as Adolph von Menzel in 1898. His works form an important record of life in Prussia at the time. Several of his paintings and book illustrations are dedicated to the life of Frederick the Great. Sanssouci (meaning Free of Care), was Frederick's summer palace at Potsdam, near Berlin.
The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes) (1875)
The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes) is an oil on canvas painting by German artist Adolph Menzel, created in 1872-1875. The painting is one of his main works from the time when the painter was mostly concerned with contemporary issues and the social question as a result of the uninhibited technical advances made during the Industrial Revolution, particularly in Germany. It has the large dimensions of 158 by 254 cm. The signature of the artist can be seen at the lower left: "Signatur Adolph Menzel. Berlin 1875". The realistic painting caused a stir at the time and is now part of the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie, in Berlin.
There are over 100 penciled preliminary studies for the painting in the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin. Movement studies show the individual work steps of steel processing in the rolling mill, as well as overall views of the blast furnace plant in different lights, individual machines and tools. Menzel also created a gouache titled Self-portrait with a worker at the steam hammer (Leipzig, Museum of Fine Arts, no. 1972/6), where he sketches the man at the steam hammer in the background of a machine shop. The final painting was created in the studio with the help of models for the different postures. The publisher Wilhelm Spemann wrote about this work: "In this description of the iron rail forge from Königshütte in Upper Silesia, the highest degree of naturalistic observation is combined with virtuosity of presentation and a strong feeling for painterly effect. The scientific accuracy of the description cannot be pushed any further, the liveliness of the expression cannot be increased. There are numerous drawn studies that Menzel made for this picture of modern cyclops, in the work itself the drawing recedes behind the mastery with which the tremendous difficulties of air and light painting have been overcome.”
Studio Wall (1872)
Studio Wall is an oil painting by the German artist Adolph Menzel, from 1872. It is held at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. It is considered a masterpiece of his maturity, which he deemed his best painting.
The painting depicts a red colored wall of the artist's studio at night, upon which are hung a series of plaster casts illuminated from below. The casts include portrait busts, death masks and life masks of friends of the artist, children, classical personae such as Dante and Schiller, male and female torsos, a dog and possibly Goethe or Wagner; art historian Werner Hofmann saw this assemblage as a conscious blurring of "the dividing line between fame and anonymity." Numerous commentators have noted that the array of dramatically lit casts "convey an uncanny impression of quasi-animateness."
The Meeting of Frederick II and Joseph II in Neisse in 1769 (1857)
The Meeting of Frederick II and Joseph II in Neisse in 1769 is an oil on canvas history painting by Adolph Menzel, executed in 1855–1857, showing the meeting of Frederick II of Prussia with Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor at Neisse on 25 August 1769. It is now in the Alte Nationalgalerie, in Berlin.
In the War of the Austrian Succession, from 1740 to 1748, and in the Seven Years' War, from 1756 to 1763, Prussia under Frederick II and Austria under Maria Theresa, were bitter opponents. The long-standing struggles ended for the Habsburg monarchy with the loss of Silesia.
The Balcony Room (1845)
The Balcony Room is an oil-on-canvas painting by the German artist Adolph Menzel, executed in 1845. It is one of the main works of his early period and one of his most famous paintings. It has belonged to the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, since 1903.
Menzel painted numerous paintings of interior views until 1848. This room belonged to the Menzel family's apartment on Schöneberger Strasse, at the time on the south-eastern outskirts of Berlin, where the artist lived with his mother and siblings. During this time he also made the illustrations for the multi-volume history of Frederick the Great by Franz Theodor Kugler (until 1842), which marked his artistic breakthrough. In Kugler's work, Menzel had already used the motif of a door letting light through in chapter 42. It is a woodcut of the round library in Sanssouci Palace, which shows the windows that reach down to the floor flooded with light. In addition to the picture from this apartment, Menzel made other pictures of the apartments in Ritterstrasse and Marienstraße.
Falcon Attacking a Pigeon (1844)
Falcon Attacking a Pigeon (German - Falke auf eine Taube stoßend) is a painting by Adolph Menzel, produced in 1844 as a hunting target. It is now in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
The painting shows a falcon, with an open beak and spread claws, pouncing in a turn from the top right on a white pigeon, which, coming from the left, also with spread feet and folded down, spread tail, as if it were about to land, immediately flies under him. The scene is shown in full format: the outstretched wings of the bird of prey reach into the upper left corner of the picture and the upper edge of the picture, while the tail feathers of the prey end just above the lower edge of the picture. The background is a representation of the sky, which towards the edges of the painting takes on a gloomy, gray-greenish tint and seems to merge downwards into a suggested forest or city backdrop, while there is more sky blue in the middle and the central point of the composition, the space between the beak ready to be grabbed and the claws of the falcon and the prey, is highlighted by a white cloud in the background.
Lady Walking by a Fountain in the Kissingen Spa Garden (1885)
Lady Walking by a Fountain in the Kissingen Spa Garden is a gouache on paper painting by German artist Adolph Menzel, from 1885. The work depicts a Summer garden scene that takes place in Bad Kissingen, where Menzel shows the influence of the contemporary style of French impressionism, both in terms of motif and technique. The painting is in the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw.
Menzel was a frequent guest in Bad Kissingen, staying with his sister's family, especially after the death of his brother-in-law, in 1880. Menzel regularly would stay in the Hailmann Villa at Kurhausstrasse 3 (currently the Martin-Luther-Strasse 9). From one of the rooms in this villa, he could look onto the spa gardens, as can be seen by the current painting. The view taken from the window is a recurring motif in Menzel's work and can be seen, for example, in some paintings done in Berlin, like Hinterhaus und Hof (1844), now at the Nationalgalerie, in Berlin.
The Foot of the Artist (1876)
Der Fuß des Künstlers; Öl auf Holz; Eigentum des Vereins der Freunde der Nationalgalerie
The Berlin-Potsdam Railway (1847)
The Berlin-Potsdam Railway is an oil-on-canvas painting by German artist Adolph Menzel, created in 1847. It belongs to the early creative phase of the artist and depicts a section of the Berlin-Potsdam Railway, opened in 1838, at the southwest of the city center of Berlin, in a style that seems to anticipate impressionism. This is the first painting to depict a railway train in the landscape in German painting. The work belongs to the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie, in Berlin, since 1899.
Topographically, the painting does not exactly depict the curve to the southwest of the then single-track Berlin-Potsdam railway, the first line in Prussia, near today's Gleisdreieck. The painter's point of view was roughly the elevation near Schöneberger Großgörschenstraße, south of the track. The area was still undeveloped at the time, but was already earmarked for the large expansion of Berlin and looked correspondingly desolate after the abandonment of agricultural and horticultural use. The painting in the middle distance is dominated by a group of dark trees that appears to be extremely large. The silhouette of Berlin city center can be seen on the horizon; the two domes are the German and French cathedrals at the Gendarmenmarkt, but they are only hinted by Menzel's hasty brushwork.
Fredrick II at the Battle of Hochkirch (1856)
Фридрих и его люди в битве при Хохкирхе
Departure of King Wilhelm I for the Army, July 31, 1870 (1871)
Departure of King Wilhelm I for the Army, July 31, 1870 is an oil on canvas painting by German artist Adolph Menzel, created in 1871. It depicts a scene that takes place in the avenue Unter den Linden, in Berlin, where a crowd is paying tribute to King Wilhelm I of Prussia, as he passes in an open carriage, on his way to the Franco-Prussian War, who had started two weeks earlier. The painting is part of the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie, in Berlin, since 1881.
In the summer of 1870, Menzel was on vacation in Switzerland, which he cut short after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. According to tradition, he was sitting in a restaurant on the first floor of the Linden in Berlin on July 31, 1870, and was thus able to witness the king's departure for the army. Menzel wrote that he did the painting with his left hand, as for example those from his series about Frederick II. Significantly, Menzel, originally left-handed, had learned the ability to work equally well with both hands. For reasons of lighting in the composition, he chose the right hand for the preliminary drawing and the left hand for the painterly part. Max Jordan assumed the painter's position to be on the south side of the Linden near the Russian Embassy, not far from the Brandenburg Gate. But the neo-baroque facades on the right do not match. This then-modern type of ornate architecture was under construction on Friedrichstrasse. At that time, a late-classical style prevailed on Unter den Linden. Elsewhere it is said that Menzel reported that “on July 31, 1870 he was on his way to the hairdresser’s when he suddenly saw the king’s carriage on Unter den Linden. The farewell waves and various shouts would have made it clear to him that Wilhelm was about to leave the capital in order to travel to the troops marching up on the Rhine."
Laying out the March Dead (1848)
Laying out the March Dead (German: Aufbahrung der Märzgefallenen) is an oil painting by the German artist Adolph Menzel, from 1848. It shows a crowd of people on Berlin's Gendarmenmarkt. The figures are attending the Coffin Laying of civilians who died during the Berlin March Revolution. Menzel attended the ceremony and during the event – or shortly afterward – he began work on the first studies for the painting. The lower left corner of the painting is not executed in oil paint, which is why most scholars consider it to be unfinished. Art historians disagree about the possible political or aesthetic motives of the painter for this. The painting belongs to the group of revolutionary paintings that were rarely created in Germany.
Menzel did not follow the guidelines of traditional history painting with his painting. On the one hand, art critics categorized it as "historical painting of the present", on the other hand, the classification as "historical painting" was rejected altogether. The Laying out of the March Fallen initially played no role in public perception, as it remained in the painter's artist's studio. Shortly before the turn of the century, it was sold to a private gallery in Zurich and only came into the possession of the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1902, which made it accessible to the public for the first time.