Mansell.
MEISSONIER.A CAVALIER.
Baschet.
ADOLF MENZEL, 1837.

Menzel was almost the only one in Germany who could draw and paint in the time before the French influence had made itself felt. The struggle for existence had forced him to learn. In the year of Bismarck’s birth there was born in Breslau the man destined to glorify, first the greatness of the old kingdom of the Fredericks, and then that of new imperial Prussia. Cast out at an early age on the inhospitable wilderness of life, he came to Berlin, poor and lonely, and not so much for the sake of art as for gain. There he sat in his cheerless attic, without a servant; and wrapped up in his plaid, with a coffee-pot on one side and a pencil on the other, he looked out over the roofs of the vast town, the most brilliant epoch of which he was predestined to depict and to conquer by his art. Since it brought in profit sooner than anything else, he had made himself familiar with the technique of reproduction; and having devoted himself in particular to the newly discovered art of lithography, he turned out ménus, New Year cards, vignettes for occasional poems, etc., and in things of this sort displayed a genuine affinity of spirit with Chodowiecki and Gottfried Schadow. From his twelfth year onwards he had not only assured his own existence, but even supported his family by such work; and in the hours he spent over it he laid the groundwork for becoming the master of masters amongst the moderns. Menzel is not merely a man who owed to himself everything which he afterwards became, who learnt to draw by his own unassisted endeavours, who mastered oil-painting without a teacher, and went further in it than any one of his generation—a man who found out entirely by himself new methods and combinations in water-colours and gouache; but if it is asked who was the greatest German illustrator, the man who did most in Germany to advance the art of woodcut engraving, the one German historical painter of the century who was entirely original, who really knew a bygone period so exactly that he could venture on painting it, the name of Menzel is invariably uttered.

Even in the twelve simple lithographs which appeared in 1837, “Memorable Events from Prussian History in the Brandenburg Era,” the “scholar” Menzel stands ready as the actual historian of the Prussian kingdom. In an age which took its pleasure in a vaporous, sentimental enthusiasm for the mediæval splendour of the empire, he was the one who as a youth of twenty pointed to the corner-stones of Prussian history in the Brandenburg times; he was the only man of his age who refused to blow the horn of the mawkish Romanticists, and still less that of the impassioned historical painters who came after them. For his were no theatrically tricked out scenes of tragedy, no touching situations; they had nothing poetical; and just as little were they tedious pictures of ceremonies or spectacular pieces. Striking characterisation and sparkling vividness were united here to the most painstaking study of nature and history, carried down to the peculiarities of costume and weapons. History was not arranged in accordance with academic formulæ, but delineated as if from life with absorbing truthfulness. Everything was expressed simply and sincerely, without exciting passages, and without conventional sentiment pumped out of models. Every epoch had its historical physiognomy, and costume was reduced to its proper subordinate place.

Franz Kugler was the first who understood this sincere and pithy art.

The Life of Napoleon had appeared, at that time, in Paris, with illustrations by Horace Vernet, and it had a considerable sale in Germany also. This gave a Berlin publisher the idea of a similar German work, and Kugler commissioned Menzel to illustrate his biography of Frederick the Great. It is almost impossible to pay sufficient honour to the influence which this book on Frederick has had on German art. It made an epoch in the history of wood engraving. The technique of this craft had been completely forgotten in Germany ever since the beginning of the century, or used only for the production of rough trade-marks for tobacco; Menzel had to invent it afresh and teach an engraving school of his own before the four hundred masterly plates of the book were made possible.

MENZEL.  FREDERICK THE GREAT AND HIS TUTOR.

But it became more revolutionary still for the æsthetic ideas of the time. Menzel had not set himself to produce a sequence of pictures, displaying events and heroes in the most ideal situations possible, but made it his business to sift the entire life of Frederick the Great to its minutest particulars. And here began that philological study of records which Menzel has carried on with the strenuous labour of an archivist down to the present day. Old Fritz had been caught by Chodowiecki in the way in which he has since lived in the popular imagination: as the old man on horseback, with his bent shoulders and his crutch-stick, holding a review, and as the philosopher, the statesman, the warrior and hero in the most manifold situations. Menzel, in whom the spirit of Chodowiecki lived again, only needed to begin where the latter left off. Stepping on the antiquarian material of Chodowiecki, he worked his way into the great period on which Frederick and Voltaire have set the stamp of their spirit, as Mommsen worked his way into Roman history. He read through whole libraries; he copied all attainable portraits. With scientific pedantry he did not forget to study the buttons and the cut of the trousers in the uniforms, and did not rest until he knew the old grenadiers as a corporal knows his men. Using these labours as preparation, he proceeded to call up old Fritz and his time with the objectivity of an historian, just as they were, and not as they had better have been. Sureness of treatment even in the finest details, accurate mastery of the surroundings, and everything which had made Meissonier’s appearance so important for France, was attained at one stroke for Germany. But the very simplicity of what was offered—both in style and technique—prevented Menzel from being at the beginning accepted in his own country as an “historical painter.” He was blamed for disregarding “beauty,” and it was said that a “higher” artistic perception was sealed from him. On the other hand, the book laid the foundation of Menzel’s position in France, and was, moreover, the work on which, for a long time, the appreciation of modern German art in foreign countries was based.

MENZEL.THE ROUND TABLE AT SANS-SOUCI.

Thenceforth Menzel had a kind of monopoly in this subject, and when in 1840 Frederick William IV had the works of the great king published in an édition de luxe, Menzel, amongst others, was entrusted with the illustration. Every one of the thirty volumes contains portraits of Frederick’s contemporaries which were engraved by Mandel and others after original pictures of the period. Menzel had an apparently subordinate task. He was commissioned to make two hundred drawings for wood engraving; these, however, do not appear on separate pages, but were destined to be incorporated in the text as tail-pieces, vignettes, and the like. This was the great work which occupied him during the forties; and in these headings and tail-pieces to the works of Frederick the Great he showed, for the first time, that he was not merely a learned investigator of sources, but was full of brilliant aperçus. One has to read Frederick the Great before one can do full justice to the acuteness and ready resource, the subtlety and pungency of the artist’s pencil. All æsthetic categories of realistic and idealistic art are scattered like dust before these creations, in which the most fantastic ideas are embodied with the whole force of the realistic power of our days.