Adolph Menzel (1815–1905). The Tireless Observer

Adolph Menzel is often ranked alongside Albrecht Dürer, Caspar David Friedrich and Max Liebermann as one of the foremost German artists. His oeuvre eludes simple classification. Its development ran parallel to the transformations taking place in nineteenth-century art, from Biedermeier and Romanticism to realism and historicism. He is also regarded as a precursor of Impressionism in Germany. Throughout his life, he closely observed and recorded his surroundings. Nothing escaped his interest: historical events and humble everyday activities, royal ceremonies and labourers at work, sweeping landscapes and an ordinary tree trunk. For Menzel, art was not only a means of representing the world, but also of exploring and understanding it. No wonder his contemporaries wrote of his ‘penetrating gaze from behind his spectacles’. The National Museum in Warsaw holds over 200 prints and 45 drawings by the artist.