The Artist's Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse

Adolph Menzel

1851 · Oil on cardboard · European Paintings

This intimate, evocative interior view belongs to a group of five paintings in which Menzel studied the effects of light in simply furnished spaces he occupied in Berlin between 1845 and 1851. They are entirely characteristic of his unwavering eye for quotidian detail, yet the artist considered such works experiments and he never exhibited them. Instead, his fame rested on historicizing costume pieces and trenchant scenes of contemporary life in the German capital.

Artist

Adolph Menzel

Date

1851

Medium

Oil on cardboard

Department

European Paintings

Credit line

Purchase, Nineteenth-Century, Modern and Contemporary Funds, Leonora Brenauer Bequest, in memory of her father, Joseph B. Brenauer, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, and Paul L. and Marlene A. Herring and John D. Herring Gift, 2009