Adolph von Menzel

Commissioned from the artist in 1898 by the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, as a retirement present for Reinhold Begas (1831-1911), Berlin;

Private collection, South America;

sale, New York, Sotheby's, 4 November 2010, lot 63,

William Louis-Dreyfus, Mount Kisco, New York (acquired from the above in 2010),

The Louis-Dreyfus Family Collections (by descent from the above in 2016)

Berlin, Lehrter Bahnhof, Grosse Berliner Kunst-Ausstellung, 1899;

Berlin, Königliche National-Galerie, Ausstellung von Werken Adolph von Menzels, 1905, no.5248 ('Drei Studienköpfe', lent by Begas);

Hamburg, Le Claire Kunst, in collaboration with Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, London, 'A World caught with the eye and held by the pencil’: Drawings by Adolph Menzel , 2019, no. 42

M. Jordan, Das Werk Adolf Menzels, Munich 1905, p.99, reproduced;

M. Jordan, Das Werk Adolf Menzels, 1895-1905: II. Nachtrag dem Hauptwerke, Munich 1905; pl.6;

P. Betthausen et al., Adolph Menzel 1815-1905: Master Drawings from East Berlin, exhibition catalogue, New York and elsewhere, 1990-91, p.219, under no.77;

C. Keisch and M.U. Riemann-Reyher, ed., Adolph Menzel: Briefe, Berlin and Munich 2009, Vol.3 (1881 bis 1905), p. 1373, under no. 1878, note 1

"In the mid-1890s... Menzel tuned almost exclusively to drawing and began to restrict his subject matter to close-range realistic studies of (mainly older) individual men and women and odd, dreamlike groupings of figures also seen at close range and involved in situations that defy being described narratively or psychologically." This unusually large and highly finished drawing by Menzel was commissioned by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin as a present for the German sculptor Reinhold Begas (1831-1911), on the occasion of his retirement from teaching at the Akademie in 1898. Menzel and Begas knew each other well, having both been elected to the senate of the Akademie in 1875, and in the same year Begas produced a portrait bust of Menzel. Twenty years later, in 1895, Begas was commissioned by the Akademie to design a portrait medal of Menzel, in honour of his eightieth birthday, and in 1904 he produced two plaster casts of Menzel's hands, one holding a pencil and the other a paintbrush.