Menzel

Adolph Menzel was an artist of colossal energy and encyclopedic accomplishments, the tireless chronicler of contemporary Berlin during a career that spanned seven decades. He first found fame as a book illustrator and printmaker, only taking up painting in the 1840s. Details of city life that he recorded in countless pencil sketches, made as he roamed the city, frequently found their way into his complex and crowded oil paintings. Some of Menzel's acquaintances are depicted in The Departure of King William I for the Front (top right), an event the artist witnessed from a restaurant on Unter den Linden. With the king's carriage all but lost in the throng, the painting is less a historical record than a portrait of Berlin's fashionable bourgeoisie.

Menzel's limitless curiosity embraced opposite poles of Berlin society, leading him to depict the upper classes at court as well as industrial workers in factories. Even his landscapes range in subject from princely gardens to the backyards of tenements. Though Menzel never married, the intimate rituals of the domestic realm were important to him. In a series of oil sketches of the mid-1840s he explored his family's apartment and the views from its windows. Unknown until the time of his death in 1901, these sketches were immediately recognized as important precursors of impressionism.

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