When he had done honour to the military comrades of the great ruler in his work of wood engraving, “Heroes of War and Peace in the Time of King Frederick,” and thus made the epoch his own through a decade of busy labour, Menzel, draughtsman though he was, turned round and became the painter of Frederick the Great. In the history of art there have never been two names more intimately connected with each other. Menzel was a strenuous worker, who never knew the passion for woman, either because he had no time for it, or because he despised women after being despised by them as a poor, hard-featured student of art; a man whose great bald head appeared at Berlin subscription-balls amid groups of brilliant cavaliers and queens of beauty, fashion, and grace, surrounded by the rustle of their silks and in the whirlpool of a dancing throng, gleaming with colour and sparkling with gold and jewels; and appeared there simply because this world interested him as something to be painted. He was a recluse who went into society solely to make observations for his art, and when there was chary of speech and much feared. He was always a busy experimentalist, so that his two hands gradually became equally dexterous; at the age of eighty he could still sketch with firm and accurate strokes while travelling in a railway carriage.

Though he had hitherto devoted himself to drawing, he had also by his own independent study made himself familiar with the technique of oils; and he now became such a master of colour as few were at that time. In the middle of the century were painted those two masterpieces which now hang in the Berlin National Gallery, “The Round Table at Sans-Souci” and “The Concert of Frederick the Great.” These are historical pictures, the authority and importance of which cannot be shaken by even the most modern of critics. If what is called the spirit of an age has ever been embodied in pictures, it is embodied here, where the master-minds of the eighteenth century are assembled at their genial round table. The scene is the oval dining-room of the castle. The meal is over, and there reigns a genial after-dinner mood, champagne sparkles in the glasses and a smart rivalry of wit is in progress. Afternoon has crept on, and a cold, subdued daylight floods the room, in which every fragment of the architecture, from the inlaid floor to the gilded capitals of the pillars and the stucco of the arched ceiling, every piece of furniture and every chandelier, bears the wayward grace of the high-rococo period; all is comprehended with the most intimate knowledge. In the second picture a fine candlelight is glimmering over the scene. Frederick is just beginning to play the flute, and the musicians of the string quartet pause, to strike in again after the solo. The Court is grouped to the left: the ladies in gilded easy-chairs, and their cavaliers behind them. The tapers of the chandelier and the sconces branching from the wall shed over everything their prismatic, broken light reflected by the mirrors, and fill the fantastic, capricious, graceful, comfortable apartment, here with streaming brightness, there with a finely modulated twilight. Only Menzel could have conjured up in so convincing a manner the brilliancy of this Court festival of the past.

Hanfstängl.
MENZEL.FREDERICK THE GREAT ON A JOURNEY.

Here is that exactness which an historical picture must have if it makes any claim to intrinsic worth. Whilst the ordinary historical painters were content to transmute dressed-up models into types of the universally human, and to put historical labels on their frames, Menzel succeeded in really penetrating a bygone age in an artistic spirit, and in making it live again for the present generation. He did not burrow to discover another dim historical personage every year, but confined himself to one hero—to the figure of the Prussian hero-king, familiar to every child, and still living in the popular imagination; and he learnt to master the time of this favourite hero as if he had been old Fritz himself. Menzel had never heard him blowing on his flute, and never sat at table with him in Sans-Souci, but the painting of these scenes comes out true and life-like in the artist’s work, because the past history of his country had become as vivid to him as his own age. His “Battle of Hochkirch” rises to tragical grandeur, precisely because everything that is outwardly impassioned is far from him. His “Frederick the Great on a Journey,” where the king is inspecting territories alter the war and ordering the rebuilding of demolished houses, his “Frederick’s Meeting with Joseph II in Niesse,” and all the other pictures of the sequence, by their marvellous naturalness and intense vividness, and by their freedom from pompous phrasing, stand alone in an age dominated by empty sentiment. Menzel, who never laid his sketch-book down from the time he was twelve years old, found a subject of pictorial interest in everything that he saw around him, until finally he acquired the power of moving with natural self-possession in a period that was not his own. By the roundabout way through the rococo period he has taught us to understand ourselves. In his pictures an apparently paradoxical problem has been solved. An intense feeling for modern reality waked to new life the past, that same past which no one had approached with success by the way of idealism.

MENZEL.   ILLUSTRATION TO KUGLER’S HISTORY OF FREDERICK THE GREAT.

And if we look over the whole development of modern art it strikes us as a remarkable fact that the most concrete spirits, the most thorough masters of technique, like Meissonier and Menzel, were precisely those who ventured to advance into the present. When they had crossed the province of the rococo period, avoided by all scholastic art, they had arrived again at the epoch when Mengs and David had interrupted the natural course of the history of art, one hundred years before. About 1750 the fateful movement towards the antique had been accomplished; in 1820 the Middle Ages had the upper hand; in 1830 the Cinquecento was in the ascendant with Cornelius and Ingres; in 1840 the seventeenth century was awakened through Delacroix and Wappers; and in 1850, after “the courses of the centuries were sphered”—to use the phrase of Cornelius—Meissonier and Menzel painted things which had not appeared worth representing to the painters of 1750, blinded, as they were, by the glory of the antique. Not less striking is it that the nearer the historical subject came to the present the truer to nature did the picture become, and the more did it outwardly change in its features. It has shrivelled from the huge scale of David and Cornelius to the miniature scale of Meissonier and Menzel, and to some extent it thus leaves its further development to be guessed. At no distant time the historical picture will be overthrown, and the picture from modern life, hitherto but shyly handled and on the smallest scale, will swell to life size. History itself, serious history, clings merely to the rock-bed of old costume. One generation had used it with an abstract purpose as a substratum for philosophical ideas; others had made scenical pieces with its aid; a third generation turned it over for piquant traits and anecdotes. The last and greatest generation had finally come to handle it quite familiarly and humanly and without affected dignity. Their works protested against all idealism; and this expressed itself, in drawing, by their making use of the true instead of the “beautiful” line; in colour, by a fresher tint corresponding with nature rather than with the conventional ideal of beauty.

MENZEL.PORTRAIT OF FREDERICK THE GREAT.