Adolph von Menzel

1815 - 1905 • German • Painter • Realist/Impressionist

"[I approach the painting] with a beating heart and full of enthusiasm for the ideas for which the victims had fallen." - Adolph von Menzel

In his paintings Menzel moved between portraying intimate family moments, as in The Artist's Sister with Candle ( 1847 ), and momentous public gatherings, as in Funeral of the Martyrs of the Berli11 Revolution (1848). It is about painting the latter that he wrote the comment quoted above. Menzel blurred the boundaries between everyday, GENRE scenes and Grand Opus HISTORY PAINTINGS. He enjoyed an early success, in Berlin of the 1840s, with 400 ENGRAVINGS he did to illustrate a life of Frederick the Great. He was again called on to celebrate German nationalism during the FrancoPrussian War, when a collector in Berlin asked him to paint the military pageant that accompanied the departure of the Prussian king for the front. Menzel's commission came well after the event and its outcome-Prussian defeat of Napoleon III, the eclipse of France's SECOND EMPIRE, and unification of Germany under Wilhelm as emperor. Departure of King Wilhelm I for the Army on July 31, 1870 (1871) resembles the great Parisian crowd scenes of the IMPRESSIONISTS rather than a conventional propagandistic or historic painting. The street, observed from above, bustles with people; Prussian and German flags flutter in the breeze and wrap around their posts; the king and queen are but barely visible in their carriage. This has the gaiety of MANET's Concert in the Tuileries Gardens (1862) and the detached point of view (but with less-distant elevation) of MONET's Boulevard des Capucines, Paris (1873). Menzel's exuberant throng provides a curious contrast to MEISSONIER's The Siege of Paris (1870), which shows the ravages of the German victory that Wilhelm is, in Menzel 's picture, setting off to accomplish.