Adolph von Menzel

The Artist's Estate;
Sale, Vienna, Dorotheum, 17 October 2007, lot 197;
Sale, London, Sotheby's, 20 November 2013, lot 51

The vast majority of Menzel’s drawings are not directly connected to finished paintings, but were instead created by a fascinating and wildly talented man, who for the best part of sixty years never left home without a sketch book and drawing instruments and was known regularly - and in a totally unannounced fashion - to begin drawing people, whether strangers on the street or elegant company at a society event. This obsessive need to draw, both as a way to satisfy his own artistic instincts and as a means of documenting his social surroundings, resulted in Menzel becoming one of the most accomplished and instantly recognisable draughtsman active in the 19^th Century.