Drawings of A. von Menzel

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Drawings of A. von Menzel.

3 1924 020 534 875

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Library

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DRAWINGS OF A. VON MENZEL

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PLATE I

FRONTISPIECE

A WOMAN WITH A SHAWL AROUND HER HEAD

DR/WINGS OF

A VON MENZEL

LONDON. GEORGE NEWNES LIMITED
SOUTHAMPTON STREET. STRANDw.c
NEW YORK .CHARLES SCRIBNEKS SONS

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LONDON :

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED.

DUKE STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E., AND GREAT WINDMILL STREET, W.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

HER

. Frontispiece

A WOMAN WITH A SHAWL AROUND
HEAD

TITLE PAGE FOR AN ALBUM .

CAFE, WITH CHESS PLAYERS .

A CHILD WITH HANDS FOLDED .

THREE MEN DISPUTING ....

IN CHURCH

CHILDREN SLEEPING

A CHILD FALLEN ASLEEP

STUDIES OF ARMOUR ....

LADY SITTING BY A PIANO

PORTRAIT OF A MAN ....

COSTUME STUDIES

CHILDREN BLINDFOLDED

TWO MEN AND A LADY ....

HELMETS

INTERIOR OF A HOUSE AT SALZBURG .

LADY IN AN ARM CHAIR

HALL IN THE LEOPOLDSKRON-PALACE

SALZBURG

YOUNG WOMAN SEATED ....

THE MONASTERY AT MELK ON THE DANUBE
COUNT MOLTKE'S FIELD-GLASSES
OLD LADY IN A HIGH-BACKED CHAIR .
WINDOWS IN AN i8th CENTURY HOUSE
IMAGINARY SCENE IN MENZEL'S STUDIO, AFTER

HIS DEATH

THE BROLETTO AT BRESCIA .

PLATE

AT

I

1

3
4

5
6

7
8

9

lO

II

12

13
14

15
16

18

19
20

21

22

24

25

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS— con/mwerf

GROUP FROM THE PARTHENON SCULPTURES

CHATEAU IN A PARK

STUDIES OF A GIRL IN A HAT

A MAN DRAWING A CART ....

A HOODED FALCON

A MAN'S HEAD

HEAD OF AN EAGLE

A SLEEPING LION'S HEAD ....

A GIRL WITH PAPER BAGS ....

A DROMEDARY'S HEAD

AN i8th century ARM CHAIR

OLD LADY IN A CAP .....

THE CHURCH BELL

A NEPTUNE FOUNTAIN IN THE PALACE COURT-
YARD AT MERSEBURG ....

STUDIES FOR A BOY CRYING

TOP OF THE PULPIT IN THE CATHEDRAL AT
WURZBURG

TOMBSTONE OF A BISHOP IN THE CATHEDRAL
AT WURZBURG

INTERIOR OF A CHURCH AT WURZBURG .

LOFT IN THE ALL SAINTS' CHAPEL AT RATISBON

THE TURRETS OF THE CHAPEL AT WURZBURG

STUDIES OF A MAN'S BACK, A WOMAN'S HAND, Etc.

STUDIES OF TWO HEADS . .

TWO LADIES AND A GENTLEMAN

PLATE

. ^6

27

28
29

30
31

3a

33
34
3S
36
31
38

39
40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

VI

THE DRAWINGS OF
ADOLPH VON MENZEL

BY Prof. H. W. SINGER

OR two or three decades Menzel was a member of the
Institut de France and an Officer of the Legion of
Honour, as well as a member of the Royal Society
of Painters in Water Colours and the Royal Academy
of London. Yet, outside his own country, he was
scarcely more than a name, except, perhaps, to the
presidents and leading officers of such bodies as I have mentioned.
Not long ago I found a French critic attempting to expound Menzel
to his countrymen, and he had so far misapprehended his hero that
he tried to make him out a sort of excellent German Meissonier. In
England, too, he may be put on a line with the League of Cambrai,
the Peace of Munster, the Cabal, and other such names, which you at
once recognise as very important when you hear them mentioned, but
about which you cannot for the life of you remember details and dates.
Almost ninety years ago, upon the 8th of December, 1815,
Menzel saw the light of day in Breslau. This city was for a long
time the third largest of the German Empire, without any attractions
to match its size.

Menzel's father, originally principal of a girls' seminary, set up a
lithographic establishment, in which the lad at an early age found an
opportunity of coming into touch with the fine arts. His parents
decreed that he should become a scholar, but there were many
hindrances in the way of his turning student; and since he had
evinced a desire to draw as soon as ever he could hold a pencil, it was
easy to prepare him for the work of a practitioner in the lesser arts,
if not indeed for an artist.

When Menzel was fourteen years of age his father sold his business
at Breslau and migrated to Berlin. Here, too, he occupied himself
with lithographic work, in which he was assisted by his son. The
family had scarcely been a year and a half in the capital when the
father died — in January, 1832. Menzel, only sixteen years of age.

THE DRAWINGS OF ADOLPH VON MENZEL

was now thrown entirely upon his own resources, and, moreover, had
to help towards the support of his nearest relatives. For the sake of a
living he executed vignettes for tradesmen's bills, letter-headings, designs
for stencils, bottle-labels and similar hack-work, and a long period of
privation and plodding began for him.

What he did at that time gave indication of what there was in the
man. For where another would simply have satisfied the crude demands
of the trade, he strove conscientiously to do his best and to give his
customers more than their money's worth. Many of his early invi-
tation and congratulatory cards, title pages and ephemeral designs are
full of happy notions and clever allusions. Instinctively he felt that
black-and-white art is a medium that lends itself to argument and
discussion, and he did not miss his opportunity of communicating to an
outer world what was in his own mind.

What he suffered at the time went far towards giving his character
that bias which made him famous as a man. For him it was a period
of what to anybody else would have seemed joyless drudgery. But it
awoke no revolutionary sentiments or even feelings of dissatisfaction in
him. It was then that he laid the foundation of that spirit which was
best incorporated in the motto to which he remained true unto the very
last day of his long life : nulla dies sine linea. Many decades later,
when Menzel was accepted as the first artist of his country, young men
occasionally applied to him for encouragement and advice — he always
had a weakness for whoever considered him the model for the younger
generation. Among these correspondents Otto Greiner — now, too, an
artist of well-known standing — bewailed the loss of time that young
men suffer while doing " pot-boilers " and " sweet pretty-pretty "
work for the sake of keeping body and soul together, whereas, had fate
been a little more kind, they might have devoted all their energies to
that which is highest and best in art. Menzel's sober and impressive
reply culminates in the monition : " Young man, there is no such thing
as a ' pot-boiler,' there is no such thing as loss of time." He wrote :
" But there is still another matter which seems to trouble you, and
which is spared nobody unless he happens to have come into the world
swaddled in bank-notes. This thing has many names, and a different
one in every new place. I note with you it is styled ' sweet, pretty-
pretty stuff' ; the world in general calls it the bitter herb 'must ! ' or
' the dire battle of life.' .... There have been people, you know,
who to-day count for something, and who, when they were young
and helpless, had to put up with decidedly worse offers than this one
you speak of. Yet everything had to be gulped down, nay, had to be
cheerfully turned into an opportunity of practice, of progressing. Here

THE DRAWINGS OF ADOLPH VON MENZEL

there is no other possible way but to accept once for all everything as
a genuine artistic problem. You will then cease at once to consider
anything unworthy of your powers ; even the 'pretty-pretty stuff' will
wax interesting, instructive, and even difficult. There is not much
room in life for the negatory spirit of our youngsters. Your everyday
surroundings should be studied best and most thoroughly. Those are
the lines on which Art in former times proceeded to glory. Our old
masters were narrowed down to the home circle a good deal more
closely than we."

Many a man has had to suffer much during his youth, and yet had
not wit enough to acquire such sage views of life's problems. But it is
equally clear that Menzel would never have come by them had not
fate treated him so harshly at the beginning.

Menzel's first stroke of good luck came in the shape of an offer to
do up, or rather, do afresh, a set of lithographs illustrating the life of
Luther. The publisher was sufficiently well satisfied with his work to
accept in the following year a set of original lithographic designs by
Menzel for publication. They were styled Kiins tier's Erdenivallen^
which may be rendered in English, 'The artisfs worldly pilgrimage,
or perhaps The artisfs purgatory. It retells, in eleven pictures, the
old story of Genius, all but extinguished in infancy, trampled upon
during youth, wildly idealistic, at the same time neglected and scoffed
at during manhood, and finally lauded above the skies — after death.
There is a good deal of bathos in such a programme, and yet it is
remarkable how straightforward and simple the story is as presented
by this lad of eighteen years. Those were the days when Germany
was in a state of great poverty and still suffered from the effects of
the Napoleonic wars. What was lacking in the way of comfort and
the smiles of fortune was made up for by a slightly strained loftiness
of purpose and exaltation of principle. We may presume that at that
time an artist would have been downright ashamed of prosperity.
This should be borne in mind when trying to estimate Menzel's
album. It will then appear to be rather a simple statement, no
more, and especially not the reproachful wail for which we would be
inclined to regard it at the present time. The drawings received
much attention, and were even distinguished by the express appro-
bation of Schadow, then the veteran and accepted leader among
Berlin artists.

There is no text ; each one of the pictures has a simple title. Germ,
Trend, Compulsion, Freedom, Schooling, Trials and Tribulations,
Love, Castles in the Air, Reality, The End, Posthumous Fame.
Each design, however, is supplemented by a little vignette below,

3

THE DRAWINGS OF ADOLPH VON MENZEL

and this embodies the author's comment upon the situation. In
Germ an urchin, three or four years old, is about to be beaten for
having decorated the floor with the first fruits of his inventive hand.
The vignette below discovers a butterfly barely escaped from the
chrysalis and already beset by the dangers of the net. Hardly does
genius unfold its wings before it is straightway threatened with
destruction. Again, in Reality the artist is at work upon the portrait
of an ugly old woman, while her husband lords it over him and
insists upon having the picture painted the way he wants it, since he
is going to pay for it. Through an open door we see the artist's
wife with her two children — constituting the dira necessitas for him.
The vignette below shows us an old hag trimming a swan's wings.
Perhaps the bird of beautiful song would soon be ready to depart on
its last glorious flight, but Reality intervenes and clips its wings
before it can mount.

Thus, this juvenile effbrt displays the same spirit as the work
upon which Menzel's fame in later days principally rested. Whether
he illustrated his own or another's story, he embodies in various
ways his own philosophical comments upon the situation depicted.
Sometimes, as here, it accompanies the illustration, at others it is
encased, as it were, within the illustration itself.

Menzel now attended the Academy schools, but only for a very
short time. His reputation soon spread, and he received many further
orders for lithographic work, while, in addition, he taught himself the
technique of oil-painting.

The year 1839 represents a turning-point in Menzel's career. Mr,
Weber, a publisher in Leipsic, decided in that year to issue a volume
dealing with the life of Frederick the Great. He engaged Franz
Kugler to write the text, and Kugler recommended Menzel as the
artist most fit to design the illustrations. Menzel accepted the offer; he
was still under age, and the agreement had to be signed by his
guardian. In the month of March he began the study and pursuit of
the one great subject which was to occupy his thoughts throughout the
greater half of his career — " The Life and Times of Frederick the
Second, King of Prussia."

He hunted up all the portraits of his hero that he could lay hands
on, and drew from them until he knew Frederick's features and figure
by heart, so that he could almost draw them in the dark. He did the
same with the principal men and women at Frederick's court. He
then studied the uniforms, arms, costumes and decorations of those
days in the same singularly conscientious and painstaking manner.
Finally, he drew all the historic localities, the rooms, houses, palaces,
4

THE DRAWINGS OF ADOLPH VON MENZEL

the furniture and articles of use of the period, still to be found in
them or in the museums. There are hundreds and hundreds of
sketches of this kind, showing his gradual progress in acquiring a
complete knowledge of every detail pertaining to the times of
Frederick.

This first book, Kugler's " Frederick the Great," was completed
long before Menzel's studies were at an end, of course, and it does not
embody the final fruits of his researches. It contains 378 woodcuts,
and we note how the woodcutters and the designer mutually trained
one another to finer work as the book proceeded. Menzel gradually
learned what effects could best be produced by means of woodcuts,
while his assistants, on the other hand, learned, from block to block,
how better to follow up the artist's ideas and intentions.

From many points of view the Kugler volume was for the artist
no more than a study itself. He profited by the experiences with
which it furnished him when he undertook to do the two hundred
illustrations for the edition de luxe of Frederick II.'s own writings.
This set of woodcuts is far superior to those of the Kugler volume.
It represents, after all, perhaps the firmest pillar upon which Menzel's
fame will rest. From the standpoint of pure draughtsmanship these
designs have never been surpassed. The woodcutters who transferred
them upon the block attained to the very height of excellence in
facsimile woodcut. The pictures are especially interesting, inasmuch
as they contain Menzel's own strictures upon the times. For they
are not mere prosy illustrations of corresponding passages in the
text. One of them is a portrait of the Marquise de Pompadour,
accompanying Frederick's satirical imaginary epistle of this personage
to the King of Hungary. Menzel renders captivatingly in line a
well-known portrait of the lady and encases it in a beautifully
carved frame, the different figures and ornaments of which constitute
severely critical mementoes of her career and character. He includes
among them a repetition of the Due d'Orleans' famous '"'• petit s pieds^''
well known to collectors of French illustrated books of the eighteenth
century. The vignette accompanying Frederick's letter to De la Motte
Fouque, in which ancient Art is compared with modern French, is not
at all done in the spirit of the text. For Menzel represents a cavalier
of the time comparing two pieces of sculpture, a noble ancient torso
with a French affected and inflated Cleopatra ; and the artist does not
leave us in doubt as to his own verdict. In illustrating the correspond-
ence between Frederick and his brother, Prince Henry, Menzel places
before us the picture of Hercules and lolas fighting the Hydra, thus
apostrophising the united efforts of the two brothers to overcome

S

THE DRAWINGS OF ADOLPH VON MENZEL

their many-headed enemy, who continually manages to renew his
strength. The vignette accompanying the close of the story of the
first Silesian War shows a powerful hand wiping the blood off a
sword with a wreath of laurels. Upon another occasion Menzel
represents a wary and dangerous lion circling about an unwieldy
elephant. It is the small but active kingdom of Prussia keeping the
huge, sluggish Austrian Empire at bay. The final vignette (printed
on the title page in the edition of 1882) shows a pair of compasses
spread apart to cover just ten centimetres and squeezing a little genie.
The compasses are gifted with a face which grins down relentlessly
at the genie's anger at being cramped in so close a space, which
forbids it unfolding its wings. In this drawing Menzel playfully
alludes to the difficulty of keeping all these illustrations within the
set compass of ten centimetres square.

Several other publications followed this work upon the life and
times of Frederick the Great. The " Soldaten Friedrichs des Grossen "
contains 31 full-page woodcuts; "Aus Konig Friedrichs Zeit" contains
12 marvellous large portrait-woodcuts of the King's most famous
generals. The most important of all is "The Army of Frederick the
Great, including as it does no less than 436 pen-lithographs. Only
thirty copies of this precious volume are in existence, and it is one of
the most perfect solutions of an iconographical task that we possess.
Menzel depicts the uniforms, weapons and accoutrements of almost
every regiment, describing all variations in buttons, trimmings, etc., of
the privates as well as of the officers. He carefully illuminated one
copy himself: the other 29 were done from this by another hand.

Two things seem almost incomprehensible in connection with this
publication. One is, how an artist of such powers and of such lively
intellect could have had the patience to complete the task — for it took
him years to do it. The other is, how he could have infused so much
artistic life into it, since it was to be little more than an inventory of
facts. Many of the soldiers in T'he Army of Frederick the Great are
superbly drawn ; the way they stand and sit, the naturalness of their
demeanour, is beyond all praise. They are not modern models dressed
in clothes of a bygone age. They look in face and figure and they act
like the people for whom those uniforms were meant.

It was not to be expected that Menzel would rest satisfied with
embodying his supreme knowledge of the life and times of his one
hero in woodcuts and lithographs, be they ever so important. During
the longer half of his life, black and white art was looked upon as an
inferior matter, and by the time that this ceased to be the case, Menzel
had virtually given up this branch of the fine arts. It was natural that
6

THE DRAWINGS OF ADOLPH VON MENZEL

his ambition was to be the painter of Frederick the Great, not only the
illustrator ^i3r excellence of his times.

His first essays in this line, I'he Dinner-Party at Sanssouci ivith
Voltaire and I'he Flute Concert at Rheinsberg, have made him popular,
though they did not in any way prepare the way for the official Court
position which at the time he fondly hoped to attain. He then painted
two big historical pictures, one commemorating Frederick the Great's
greatest victory at Leuthen, the other his worst reverse at Hochkirch.
This latter picture actually found its way into the Royal Castle, but
met with so little appreciation there that it was hung in one of the
offices, for the delectation of the lackeys. The fate of this picture deeply
chagrined Menzel. Much about the same time he found that the large
historical cartoon which he had drawn for the Kunstverein at Cassel
representing the Entrance of the Duchess Sophia with her three-year-
old son into Marburg^ had been skied in a dark library. These circum-
stances thoroughly disheartened and disgusted him. He felt that he
was wasting labours of love upon a Boeotian age. A few further
historical pictures like 'The Meeting of Frederick ivith the Emperor
Joseph II. at Neisse lacked all spirit, and the big Leuthen picture was
left unfinished until his dying day. It remained in his studio, with a
blank in place of the principal figure, as a lasting memento of his foiled
aspirations.

When in the end other work had spread his fame, and the Prussian
Court officially recognized his claim as an historical painter by com-
missioning him to paint the coronation of King William I. at Konigsberg
in 1 86 1, his wings had been clipped — ^as he himself put it, in his early
days — and the product was scarcely anything but a very large coloured
illustration of the event, not really a painting upon a purely artistic basis.
Since Menzel's death, several people who had much intercourse
with him during the last years of his life have recounted stories in
which the master is represented as having disavowed his ambitions, and
even as having spoken disparagingly of his historical pictures dealing
with the life of Frederick the Great. It is very difficult to believe
such stories as these. To begin with, it was not characteristic of
Menzel to disapprove of anything that he had ever done. He was a
true artist in that, for all his life work was based upon the firmest kind
of faith in himself. It goes without saying that he had scarcely a
word of praise for anybody's work but his own. The reader will be
surprised to learn, for example, that he even decried Diirer as a poor
and unsatisfactory artist. Hasty judges consider this bearing as a sign
of narrow-mindedness in an artist. But it should not be looked upon
in this light. Production of all kinds is a work of faith, and the

7

THE DRAWINGS OF ADOLPH VON MENZEL

greater the artist the more exclusive, the more self-confident he must
be. He may have many obliging phrases of easy praise at hand for
the work of a confrere, but if he really at heart thought it good
he would be placed in an impossible situation. For, if an artist felt
that a man who is working on totally different lines from his own
were right, he would practically confess that he himself was wrong.
He would, in a word, have to give up working. For he could
not stoop to turn copyist; neither could he, with a clear conscience,
continue on paths that he had recognised as being wrong. Many
weaker minds are actually placed in this predicament. A few among
them give up the fight ; what the remainder produce thenceforth has
no serious claims upon our attention. The great artists are not
subjected to such doubts and fears; they are esoteric and secluded.
Each one of them furnishes repeated proof of the fact that the power
of production debars one from possessing the powers of criticism.

To return to Menzel, if he actually has been guilty of such
apostasy as is reported, it must have been an act of self-delusion. It
may have been that he was, in a way, making a kind of virtue of
necessity. At any rate, this development, if it came indeed, was late
in coming. In a letter written in the year 1882, some sixteen years
after these disappointments befel him, he scoffs at the idea of having
lost faith in his own work. The letter was addressed to the author of
a dictionary of artists, and it is a very curious epistle, written more in
the style of a man of red-tape propensities than of an artist. The
syntax is peculiarly involved, and the whole very wordy ; it is difficult
to reproduce this in the translation. It contains this interesting
passage : —

" With reference to my cartoon Entrance of the Duchess Sophia
•with her three-year-old son into Marburg (drawn at Cassel, August,
1 847- February, 1 848), the facts are that I bought it back from the
proprietors who had ordered it, namely, the Hessian Art Union.
/ marvel hoia the fable that I had disavowed it could ever have
arisen ! The truth is, I saw the cartoon again at that place eighteen
years later (September, 1866), and in consequence of the absence of any
suitable locality it had been hung high up on the walls of the principal
Hall in the State Library, where it was covered with dust and quite in
the dark. The attempt to liberate my child from these surroundings
proved successful without imposing too great a strain upon my purse,
and so it has hung ever since on a wall in my rooms in just the same
light as the one in which I drew it."

It is curious to note what directions Menzel's genius took when
once deflected from its original course. One of his biographers
8

THE DRAWINGS OF ADOLPH VON MENZEL

remarks that a casual observer must come to the conclusion that
henceforth Menzel was an upholder of every new " movement " as
soon as it put in an appearance. He has painted plein-air pictures, he
has done impressionistic work, there are " realistic " paintings by his
hand, and there is work of the kind that the recent Spanish-Italian
school delighted in. It looks as if he had intended to show that he
was up to any trick that came along, and as soon as ever he had
proved, to his own conviction, at least, that he could equal Manet,
Bastien- Lepage, Pradilla, etc., on their own ground, he totally lost all
interest in their endeavours and in the style that was new for the
time being.

Every one of these paintings would be a welcome addition to any
public gallery, and each one is full of interest by reason of it being
a Menzel. But not one of them is truly inspired, and it is not the
painter in oils which posterity will cherish most in Menzel.

If, indeed, we want to get the keenest enjoyment out of his work
in this vehicle, we must fall back upon such canvasses as the Interior
with the open balcony door, which anticipates the problems that have
busied later generations for years, or the Performance in the I'hMtre
Gymnase at Paris, that wonderful picture which vies in the brilliancy
and fire of its coloration with the best of Delacroix. The former
painting was done in 1 845, the latter in 1 848.

Perhaps it was upon casually coming across old pictures such as
these two that the master in his last years was filled with dissatisfaction
with his life-work on Frederick the Great. He would have been
justified in feeling that here a gi-eat painter had been nipped in the
bud in consequence of his ill-advised search for the true " historical "
vein, his mistaken identification of that which is heroic in literature
with that which is monumental in art.

When he painted in water- and body-colour he remained more
at ease, directing his attention primarily to his media and to his style.
We need make no reservation when we praise these productions.
They form a kind of stepping-stone from the oil-paintings to that
class of work which will interest the possessor of the present volume
most. As for that, indeed, it remains to be seen whether future times
will not award the palm to his drawings pure and simple when they
make the final estimate of Menzel's life-work.

Their number is legion, and the array of them at the recent
Menzel Memorial Exhibition in Berlin — some five thousand sheets —
was simply stupendous. It is reported that he would interrupt a
social gathering, or the proceedings of some important meeting, by
gravely fetching out his sketch-book and pencil in order to draw a

9

THE DRAWINGS OF ADOLPH VON MENZEL

carved chair, an embroidered coat, somebody's hand, or whatever else
happened to strike his eye, and the proceedings sometimes came to a
standstill until he had finished. If he was not always drawing, he
was at least, in every sense of the word, always ready to draw, always
prepared for work. Sculptors, in order to give voice to gratitude or to
set up a pattern for posterity, have erected memorials symbolising
" Work." Wandering through the Menzel Exhibition one was
impressed with the fact that this really was a monument of " Work "
as powerful as any that has ever been erected, showing what sheer
force of work can achieve, and that the pure will for work, when
present to such a degree, is alone enough to immortalise a man.

Menzel was naturally left-handed. When already past boyhood
he trained himself to use his right hand too, and from that time
could draw equally well with either. It is said that he continued
making the rapid nature sketches with his left, and produced the
careful finished drawings with his right hand. ••

It was not only the mass of material that overwhelmed one at the
Menzel Exhibition, the extraordinary variety of work undertaken by
him was just as imposing. He had in the course of his career
attempted every manner of technique. Over and above that he
had attacked subjects of every description. There were quick
" impressions " taken on the wing, and minute painstaking drawings,
with all imaginable intermediate stages in addition. He would
handle the same subject at one time with an eye to contrasts of light
and shade ; at another with a view to qualities of line and the
presentation of a bold form ; at a third with an aim at general
pictorial effect. He would repeat the same study over and over
again. Many people who believed that they owned the study for
some figure in one of the famous paintings, discovered at this
exhibition that theirs was only one of a set of quite similar
drawings, and they could note how thoroughly Menzel went to
work whenever, he prepared a new picture. There were even back
and side views of figures which in the ultimate painting were to be
seen from the front. He did these, of course, merely in order to
better understand and grasp the pose, although such supernumerary
studies could not be put to practical uses. In general he strove, at
least in his early days, to study his subject so conscientiously that there
would be no more surprises of any kind in store for him. Perhaps the
best insight into his method of work was afforded by the preparatory
drawings for the Coronation picture. The National Gallery at
Berlin alone possesses 170 of these. The painting includes 132
portraits, and we have Menzel's own account of the trouble he was
10

THE DRAWINGS OF ADOLPH VON MENZEL

put to in order to get all the persons shown to sit for him. If the
picture failed in the end, it was not for want of self-sacrifice on the
part of the painter.

It is strange to note that Menzel's eyesight and his handicraft
seem to have grown stronger and more capable the older he became.
Thus it transpired that, unlike all other famous artists, his handling
did not grow broader and freer with age, but, on the contrary, went
more into detail ; he finished everything off more and more carefully
to the very end of his days.

The present selection has been made from the portfolios that
were found in his studio after Menzel's death. There were twenty-
nine of these portfolios, containing over four thousand drawings,
covering all periods of his life, and the selection is a fairly repre-
sentative one — as representative, perhaps, as fifty drawings can be
made to be out of a total of several thousands. Every one of them
is here reproduced for the first time, except the title page for an
album; I considered myself particularly lucky to be able to include
this. It is an excellent specimen of that particular style of designing
in which Menzel delighted and surpassed. It goes hand in hand
with The Maurergesellenbrief^ The Shooting Diploma, The Pater
Noster, etc.

This drawing really requires a longer commentary than it is
possible to devote to it here. Its theme is the various paths of an
artist to glory, the propitious and unfavourable experiences that befall
the many candidates, the opinions of the public at large and of the
professional critics. Some of the aspirants try the "short cut," by
currying favour with a powerful academy or a famous master ; some
by simply employing their well-filled purses, while others try to edge
themselves in by hook or by crook. Various are their professed ideals as
they journey onward to the common goal, and scathing is their opinion
of the other man's ideal. In the midst of all this turmoil the child
of genius sleeps secure in Nature's arm. She will take care of him
when time comes. He need not worry about the ways and means.

II

ILLUSTRATIONS

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