Wrocław 1815–1905 Berlin
Head of a Man in Right Profile
Signature
signed and dated, lower right: AD.Menzel ‘46
provenance
Frederick Ludwig Herman, Berlin; by inheritance, his son
Ernest G. Herman (1917–2009), Berlin and Los Angeles by 1936
by descent to the current owner
Depicted in strict profile, this intense portrait of a man by Adolph Menzel is a testament to the artist’s powers of observation, technical perfection, and keen sensitivity in capturing the psychology of his sitter. Signed and dated 1846, the sheet belongs to a small group of portraits made by Menzel in the 1840s and 50s, almost exclusively of his family members or of his friends’ families. In refusing to accept commissions for this type of work, he declared, age 35: ‘It is not my job to do portraits of all and sundry to suit the public taste or to ape fashion.’[1] Despite the anonymity of our sitter, the sense of immediacy and sympathy it evokes suggests that he very well could have been a close contact of the artist. The drawing’s beveled edges, the close-up view and unflinching medium all evoke the effect of a daguerreotype—invented in Paris in 1839, just seven years before he drew this sheet, and soon commercialized in major European industrial capitals, including Berlin, the city that made Menzel who he was.
Menzel was the leading artist of the second half of 19th-century Germany and a chronicler of life in Berlin. He was a dazzling draftsman, prolific print maker and a painter prized for his historic accuracy—all the more remarkable, as he drew with his left hand and painted with the right. In his seven-decade career that spanned an era of extraordinary social upheaval and artistic revolution, his protean style and adroit command of a kaleidoscopic range of techniques makes him a complex and curious figure at the crossroads of modernity.
Many of Menzel’s iconic portraits from the late 1840s and 50s were executed in chalk or pastel, a medium that played a central role in the draftsman and printmaker’s transition towards painting—which he did not take up until the age of 30. Menzel’s interest in pastel is tied with his long-standing fascination with the French Rococo, especially the works of Watteau. Although it was not until 1855 that Menzel visited France for the first time, he always had a keen interest in the currents of French art, from the exuberance of the Rococo to the realism of the Barbizon school of painters. Among the most important pastel portraits from this period are his drawings of the young Carl Johann Arnold (1847; Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett SZ Menzel Nr. 1723), the son of his friend, the wallpaper manufacturer Carl Heinrich Arnold and Portrait of a Young Girl (ca. 1847–48; Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett SZ Menzel Nr. 242), the five-year-old daughter of the Maercker family, his neighbor at 18 Schöneberger Strasse.
1846 was an important turning point for Menzel: it was the year of his first foray into color as a draftsman. By then he was already familiar with black and white chalk, and he would continue to use it but only for figure studies. Two historicizing male bust portraits dating from December 1846—one in three-quarter view, another in strict profile view—are referred to by the artist as ‘my successful attempt at colored chalk’. Both portraits belonged to the family of Wilhelm Puhlmann (1797–1882) of Potsdam, his most important early patron and lifelong friend, whose father was director of the Royal Picture Gallery in Potsdam. The drawings entered the Berlin National Gallery (formerly SZ Menzel cat. 1405 and 1406) but were sold on the art market in the 1920s and lost since. By February 1847, the thirty-one-year-old Menzel was already confident enough to be instructing his young pupil Carl Johann Arnold: ‘I advise you to spend the evenings doing pastel drawings in the style of portraits on ancient medallions – and life size, of course, because that is the only way you can truly benefit from the exercise. It is extremely instructive, both with a view to doing oil paintings and for capturing flesh tones.’[1] He goes on to advising in detail on the paper and the use of colored pastels, which are ‘always blended in between the shadows, being deepened with dark pastels. For details, red and ochre, also red chalk, are recommended; one should always smudge.’[2] The present drawing corresponds to this instruction, with its subtle application of peacock green in the sitter’s garment and lines of red highlighting the area around his ear. It is a significant addition to our knowledge of Menzel’s earliest color pastel experiments—the bridging technique that stands between his large canvas paintings on the one hand, and the pencil studies and lithographs, which he had known since childhood from his father’s lithography business, on the other.
Just two years before this sheet was drawn, Menzel wrote to a friend, in April 1844: ‘Recently I’ve been drifting about a lot in the Kupferstichkabinett, enjoying the engravings of the Dutch, above all Rembrandt, who is the crown jewel among them all. The more often one looks through his work, the more awestruck one becomes…!’ Rembrandt’s prints at the Berlin museum, which totaled to over 300 works at the time, undoubtedly left an imprint on the young artist, who began experimenting with the etching needle. The Dutch master’s tronies and portraits, often featuring busts of bearded men, could well have been a source of inspiration for the present work.
Given Menzel’s close involvement with the publishing world, and the personal nature of his portraiture of his period, it is possible that the present drawing was given to or acquired by the ancestor of the first known owner of the sheet, Frederick Ludwig Herman in Berlin. He was the last director of H. S. Hermann & Co., a renowned publisher and printer of modern art catalogues, lithography, and periodicals such as Kriegszeit (1914–16). Founded in Berlin in 1837, the firm was forced closed in 1936 and the family emigrated, along with the family’s significant art collection, to the U.S, where they remain in the family’s possession to this day.
The last major retrospective in the U.S. devoted to the artist was in 1996 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and before that, in 1990 at the Frick. Menzel’s as a painter of works on paper, specifically, of pastels between the mid-1840s and late 1850s was the subject of a major retrospective at the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett in 2019.
We are grateful to Dr. Marie Riemann-Reyher for confirming the authenticity this work from a high-resolution photograph.