Idina menzel

Adolph menzel drawings
Frederick the great playing the flute at sanssouci
Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel (8 December 1815 – 9 February 1905) was a German Realist artist noted for drawings, etchings, and paintings.

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Adolph Menzel

Adolph Menzel was the leading German artist of the second half of the 19th century. Born in 1815, he exhibited his first drawing at the age of 12. His father ran a lithographic printing works, and by the time he was 14, Menzel was contributing illustrations to publications.

Active first as a printmaker, and a dazzling draftsman throughout his prolific career, he turned to oil painting only after he was 30. His technical virtuosity and skill at capturing visual phenomena (such as the way in which we perceive background objects as unfocussed and blurred compared to foreground ones) attracted wide attention, and anticipated some of the effects of French Impressionism by 30 years.

During his lifetime, he was most famous for his illustrations of the life of the 18th-century Prussian monarch, Frederick the Great, and his court. Menzel was deeply concerned with historical accuracy and every detai,l down to the buttons on a uniform or the handle on a sword, was meticulously researched.

When visiting Paris, Menzel was in contact with artists there including Edgar Degas

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Adolph Menzel

German artist (1815–1905)

Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel (8 December 1815 – 9 February 1905) was a German Realist artist noted for drawings, etchings, and paintings. Along with Caspar David Friedrich, he is considered one of the two most prominent German painters of the 19th century,^[1] and was the most successful artist of his era in Germany.^[2] First known as Adolph Menzel, he was knighted in 1898 and changed his name to Adolph von Menzel.

His popularity in his native country, owing especially to his history paintings, was such that few of his major paintings left Germany, as many were quickly acquired by museums in Berlin.^[3] Menzel's graphic work (and especially his drawings) were more widely disseminated; these, along with informal paintings not initially intended for display, have largely accounted for his posthumous reputation.^[2]

Although he traveled in order to find subjects for his art, to visit exhibitions, and to meet with other artists, Menzel spent most of his life in Berlin, and w

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Adolph MENZEL

Breslau 1815 - Berlin 1905

Biography

Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel began his career working in his father’s lithography shop in Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland) and later in Berlin, where his family moved in 1830. A brief period of study at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1833 seems to have been the sum total of his formal training, and he is thought to have taught himself how to paint. At the outset of his career he worked as an illustrator, his activity in this field perhaps best exemplified by a series of some four hundred designs for wood engravings produced to accompany Franz Kugler’s History of Frederick the Great, published in instalments between 1840 and 1842. During the late 1840’s and 1850’s he was occupied mainly with a cycle of history paintings illustrating the life of Frederick the Great. In 1861 Menzel received his most important official commission, a painting of The Coronation of King William I at Königsberg, on which he worked for four years. In the following decade, his lifelong interest in scenes of contemporary life culminated i