Adolph Menzel – my daily art display

Ramsau by Thomas Fearnley

I have said on a number of occasions that one of the joys of visiting art galleries is when you suddenly come across one you did not know existed. It is always a pleasure to go to the large and famous galleries such as the Louvre, Prado, and London’s National Gallery to name just a few but I find it exhilarating when I come across, often by accident, the smaller, more hidden-away ones such as London’s Wallace Collection or the Musée Marmottan Monet Gallery in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. I had visited Birmingham before and visited the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery but a fortnight ago I decided to visit the city again and have a look at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts which is on the University of Birmingham campus. If I had not decided on that visit I would never have come across a divine portraiture work of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun which I enthused about in my last blog and which was part of their permanent collection. However the reason for me going to the gallery was to see an exhibition of the Norwegian painter Thomas Fearnley and today I want to talk a little about the life of this artist and look at one of the paintings which was in the exhibition.

Thomas Fearnley, although an English-sounding name, was Norwegian. He was a romantic painter who was born in 1802 in Frederikshald, Norway, a small town in the south east of the country, a few miles from the Norwegian-Swedish border. The town has since been renamed Halden. The Fearnley family maintained its custom of naming its eldest sons Thomas and so both his father and grandfather were named Thomas. His grandfather was an English timber merchant from Heckmondwike, a small mill town near Leeds, and who with his family moved to Norway in 1753 as a representative for a trading company based in the English seaport of Hull. Fearnley’s father Thomas was also a merchant and married Maren Sophie Paus, a woman from the important Norwegian Paus dynasty. Thomas was the eldest of their eight children.

Thomas Fearnley’s father owned a shop in Frederikshald and earned his money as an importer/exporter, importing woollen and cloth goods from England and exporting Norwegian lumber. At the age of five, young Thomas went to live with his maternal aunt, Karen and her husband, Georg Frederik Hagemann in Christiania, (now known as Oslo). The couple had no children of their own and were delighted to have Thomas live with them. When Thomas was twelve years old he was enrolled as a pupil in the cadet corps of the Military Academy. At the Academy, one of the subjects Thomas was taught was drawing. It was soon clear that he had a talent for drawing and excelled in these lessons. However he achieved less in his other subjects especially in the military training and he left the Academy in the spring of 1819.

As his father and his father’s father before him had all been merchants, it was expected that Thomas would follow suit and at the age of sixteen, for a while, he took on the role of a young merchant in his uncle’s business. However Thomas had not given up his love of drawing and every evening he would attend an elementary art class in Christiania, where he spent time copying still lifes and portraits painted by various artists.

To become an artist in Norway was quite difficult as there were no major art academies where aspiring artists could learn their trade. It could well be this factor, which forced Fearnley to travel extensively through Europe visiting major art institutions. In late 1821 he travelled to Copenhagen and enrolled at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. It was here that he came across Dutch landscape paintings of Nordic scenes by the likes of Jacob van Ruisdael. It was these seventeenth century works, which influenced Fearnley and it was these depictions of Nordic landscapes, which would play an important role in Norwegian art and Norwegian artists such as Thomas Fearnley.

In 1823, aged twenty-one, Fearnley left Copenhagen and went to live in Stockholm where he attended the Drawing Class at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts enrolling on a four-year course. During this period Thomas received a number of commissions for his landscape work including a three-painting commission from the country’s royal family. During his time at the Academy, he would take the opportunity, during summer breaks in the art course, to travel back to Norway to sketch the wild and rugged landscape of his homeland. It was at this juncture in his artistic career that he completed his first en plein air oil sketch. It was also during one of these visits to western Norway, in 1826, that he first encountered another artist on an art tour. He was Johan Christian Dahl, who would become the first great romantic painter in Norway, and one of the great European artists of all time. Dahl is now looked upon as the founder of the “golden age” of Norwegian painting.

Fearnley’s four-year art course at the Copenhagen Academy ended in 1829 and Fearnley continued with his European travels, this time going to Dresden. It was in this city that Fearnley again meets Dahl and they soon become friends and Thomas received some artistic tuition from him. One of Dahl’s other artistic friends and near neighbour was the German artist Casper David Friedrich. Fearnley spent time studying Friedrich’s work and one can see in a number of Fearnley’s landscape works a characteristic employed by Friedrich – figures in the paintings are seen from behind. Fearnley studied the different ways in which Dahl and Friedrich worked. J C Dahl used rapid brushstrokes in his paintings whilst Casper Friedrich was much slower and more methodical and his landscapes often had religious connotations. The study of these two great artists was to influence Fearnley’s art in the future.

From Dresden Fearnley travelled to Prague, Nuremberg and the lake district of Salzburg before finally settling in Munich in 1830. He was to remain in the Bavarian city for two years often travelling south to the foothills of the Bavarian Alps on painting trips. Following his two-year sojourn in Munich he and two other fellow artist Wihelm Bendz and Joseph Petzl set off on foot at the end of August 1832 on their 700 kilometre trek to Italy, passing through the Bavarian alpine village of Ramsau, which is the setting for my Daily Art Display’s featured painting today. The en plein air oil on paper, laid on canvas, sketch was completed by Thomas Fearnley within a week in 1832 and is simply entitled Ramsau. This was the first painting I came across when I entered the gallery of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, which was staging Thomas Fearnley’s exhibition In front of Nature. It was, by far, my favourite of all his works on show and was of great interest to me as I have visited the picturesque Alpine village of Ramsau on a number of occasions when I toured around Berchtesgadener Land in southern Bavaria.

The sketch is dated September 20^th 1832 and diaries kept by Wilhelm Bendz record that it was the last day the intrepid trio stayed in the village before heading across the Alps to Italy. In the picture we can see the road winding and disappearing around a corner of the village before we catch a glimpse of it again as it heads off towards their destination, the snow-covered Alps. There is a beautiful stillness about this picture. In the left middle ground we see a solitary farmer collecting hay, which will be needed for the harsh and bitterly cold winter, which is fast approaching. In the background we see the majestic snow-capped mountain, Hoher Göll, which straddles the border between the German state of Bavaria and the Austrian city of Salzburg. This en plein air work would have taken Fearnley several sittings during the week-long stay, on each occasion adding another layer of colour.

A Church at Ramsau, Austria by Wilhelm Bendz (c.1830)

It is interesting to note that whilst the intrepid trio were in Ramsau William Bendz also completed an en plein air oil sketch of the village from almost the same vantage point used by Fearnley. Bendz was principally a figure painter and this landscape work of his is a comparative rarity. You will see from Bendz’s picture that unlike the deliberate and carefully detailed picture painted by Fearnley over a seven-day period, the foreground and some other areas of Bendz’s work were hastily sketched in and the work would probably have been completed within a day or two. William Bendz’s work, which was dated September 1830, two years earlier than Fearnley’s sketch, and entitled The Church of Ramsau, Austria, can be found in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.

In my next blog I will conclude my look at the life of Thomas Fearnley and follow his journey through Europe visiting the Neapolitan and Amalfi Coasts as well as visiting England and travelling around the Lake District.

To end on a slightly sad note, Fearnley’s companion on his trek to Italy, which started in September 1832, Wilhelm Bendz, made it to Venice but soon after, in the November of that same year, on reaching Vincenza, he took ill and died from a lung infection. Bendz had noted in his diary that the road to Rome was hard, the weather conditions unfavourable and at times extremely harsh and the walking very strenuous and the exertion obviously took the ultimate toll of him.

Music in the Tuileries Gardens by Édouard Manet

Music at the Tuileries by Edouard Manet — Music in the Tuileries by Édouard Manet (1862)

In my last blog I looked at the painting Afternoon at the Tuileries Garden by Adolph Menzel which he completed in 1867. He had visited Paris that year and attended the second Exposition Universelle and it was during this stay that he completed a number of sketches of the Tuileries Gardens. On returning to his home in Berlin he completed this work. When it was exhibited, he pointed out that the painting was all done from his memory of the times when he walked around the Gardens watching the weekend promenading of the bourgeois. However, there is a train of thought that believes his work was not just based on his memories but was very much influenced by a painting he saw, when in Paris, by Édouard Manet, which was completed in 1862 entitled Music in the Tuileries Gardens. This is My Daily Art Display featured work today and I will let you decide whether Manet’s painting had any bearing on Menzel’s work.

Music in the Tuileries Garden,s like the Menzel work, hangs, in the National Gallery, London. The work depicts a fashionable Parisian crowd promenading and socialising in the Gardens as they listen to music played by a band, albeit Manet has not included the musicians in the painting. The Jardin des Tuileries lies between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde, and it was the favourite place for people to idle away their leisure time. The way in which people spent their free time in the capital became one of Manet’s favourite subjects for his paintings. Manet’s close friend going back to his childhood, Antonin Proust, the politician and journalist, often recalled the many times he witnessed Manet walking along the Parisian boulevards in search of interesting aspects of city life, which he could depict in his paintings. Manet and his companion, the poet, Charles Beaudelaire, could often be seen in the afternoons, strolling through the Tuileries Gardens, a favoured gathering place for the beau monde, who wanted “to see and be seen”. Manet completed numerous sketches of these “beautiful people” as well as the working nannies, who were spending a pleasant afternoon with their little charges.

This was Manet’s first major work on this theme. The Tuileries Gardens were created for Catherine de Medici who, on the death of her husband King Henry II of France, decided to move her home to the Louvre Palace. She then had built a separate new palace with gardens modelled after the gardens of her native Florence. These were the Tuileries Gardens and were opened to the public in 1667 and became a public park following the French Revolution. As we look at the people in the scene we can imagine the enjoyment they were having whilst they socialised and listened to the music. Leisure time and recreational activities such as listening to music in a park on a Sunday afternoon was all part of this newly quoted term, modernity.

Manet's man

Menzel's man

Menzel’s work is far more detailed than Manet’s painting. If we compare the two works there are some similarities but Menzel also maintained some differences. Both depict families enjoying their leisure time. Look at foreground and slightly right of centre of today’s painting by Manet. There is a man with the top hat bending down in conversation with a lady. He is almost the same character, in the same pose leaning against a tree, we saw yesterday in Menzel’s work. The theme of both paintings is similar – bourgeois Parisians at leisure but as I have just said there are also some differences in the two works. Menzel’s depiction of what is happening is somewhat more realistic.

In his work we saw children in the foreground playing with a bucket and spades but they are not dressed in their “Sunday best” clothes and look somewhat dirtied by their playing on the ground. Now compare that with the children in Manet’s painting. They too have buckets and spades but these children, like their adult counterparts , are dressed in their best clothes and are behaving much more demurely. Also in Menzel’s work we witnessed a small child being dragged off screeching by a woman, probably her mother. We also saw dogs skirmishing but in Manet’s work there is no such unsavoury incidents happening, which would otherwise shatter the beautiful tranquillity of the scene.

Manet has included the portraits of many of his friends into the lively social gathering, some of whom are fellow artists. Manet has painted himself at the far left of the painting partly hidden by the figure of Comte Albert de Balleroy, the wildlife artist, seen here holding a walking stick, who shared a studio with Manet. Another artist also included is Henri Fantin-Latour, best known for his flower paintings. Manet has added portraits of his brother Eugène, who was the husband of the Impressionist painter, Berthe Morissot. Several cultural figures of the time are featured in the painting such as the French poets Baudelaire and Théopile Gautier and the travel writer Baron Taylor. Other intellectuals who have found their way into the painting are the art critic Champfleury and the bearded sculptor Zacharie Astruc who sits at the table and behind him stands the journalist Aurélien Scholl. Two women sit facing us in the foreground. The younger of the two, on the left, is Madame Lejosne, the wife of the Commandant in whose house Manet met Baudelaire and the fledgling painter Frederic Bazille. The other lady is Heminie d’Alcain, the wife of Jacques Offenbach. Offenbach is the bespectacled man with a moustache who sits in front of a tree to the right of centre of the middle ground, between Eugène Manet and the painter, Charles Monginot who we see doffing his hat to a lady .

Menzel’s work was far more detailed and with his painting your eyes darted from place to place surveying different incidents. In some ways this painting, by Manet, as did Cezanne’s Large Bathers ( My Daily Art Display March 13^th))have an “unfinished” look about them but this is all to do with their style of painting. So what did the critics think of this work by Manet when it was first exhibited in 1863? It received very mixed reviews. On one hand, many of the artists who were soon to be known as the Impressionists, like Claude Monet and Frederic Bazille, were delighted with Manet’s depiction of the Parisian scene. However the conservatives among the art critics were less than complimentary. Paul Mantz, the art historian and art critic, who would later become Director General of Fine Arts and a member of Supreme Council of Fine Arts was particularly ruthless in his condemnation stating that Manet’s composition struck him as being disorganised and formless, while the broken play of light that animates its surface with such an eloquently restless quality roused him to declare that “this is not colour, but the caricature of colour”.

I have had a number of comments added to the Large Bathers blog strongly disagreeing with my assertion that Cezanne’s work had an unfinished look to it and therefore I will not dare comment about the finish of this work. Emile Zola explained the “unfinished” look of Manet’s painting, countering such criticism, saying:

“…You are to imagine a crowd of people, a hundred characters perhaps, moving about in the sunlight under the trees in the Tuileries; every character is simply a blot of colour, hardly given form at all, and the details are only lines and black dots. If I had been there I should have asked the amateur [observer of the painting] to move away to a respectful distance; he would then have seen that the patches of colour were alive, that the crowd was speaking, and that the picture was one of the characteristic productions of the artist, the one picture in fact in which he had most loyally obeyed his eyes and his temperament…”

As with most of the Impressionist works of art, the best view you get is if you stand back from the work to see its exquisiteness. Close up one just sees brushstrokes but at a distance one discovers the true beauty of the work.

So which painting do you like best, the one by Adolph Menzel or the one by Édouard Manet?

Afternoon at the Tuileries Garden by Adolph Menzel

The featured artist in My Daily Art Display today is German and is looked upon, along with the artist I featured in my previous blog, Caspar David Friedrich, as one of the most famous and most successful German artists of the nineteenth century. His name is Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel.

Menzel was born in 1815 in Breslau, which is now the Polish city known as Wroclau. His father Carl Erdmann Menzel was originally a school headmaster but when young Menzel was just three years of age he gave up his educational career and started up a lithographic printing works. Adolph Menzel first exhibited a drawing in 1827 when he was only twelve years of age and two years later he exhibited eight lithographs, which were printed in his father’s workshop and which featured the history of Breslau. To gain more business opportunities for his printing company, Menzel’s father moved his family and business to Berlin in 1830 where he knew he was likely to receive more commissions. Adolph Menzel became an apprentice in his father’s firm and at the age of seventeen took over the running of the company when his father suddenly died. His mother and siblings now looked upon Adolph as the family breadwinner.

kunstlerserdenwa00menz_0001 — Künstlers Edenwallen

In 1833, aged 18 Menzel enrolled at the Berlin Königliche Akademie der Künste where he met the wallpaper manufacturer, Carl Heinrich Arnold, who would not only become Menzel’s close friend but would furnish him with a large number of commissions. His reputation as an artist and illustrator grew after he had completed a commission for the art dealer and publisher, Louis Sachse, to create a number of lithographs for the German writer, Goethe, for his book Künstlers Erdenwallen. It was not until 1837 that von Menzel started to paint in oils. His speciality subject for his paintings was the life and events surrounding Friedrich the Great and in 1839 he was commissioned to illustrate a book, Geschichte Friedrichs des Großen (History of Friedrich the Great) written by Franz Kugler, a Prussian cultural administrator and art historian. In a three year period 1839 to 1842 Menzel produced over 400 drawings.

It was not until the 1850’s that von Menzel started to travel extensively, visiting Vienna, Prague and Dresden. It was also in 1855 that he made his first visit to Paris where he attended the inaugural Exposition Universelle, the first World Fair to be held in the capital. It was held in the specially built building, Palais de l’Industrie, which overlooked the Champs-Elysées. Whilst there, von Menzel, was able to study not only the industrial exhibits but also the art exhibits on display by French artists such as Gustave Courbet. Eleven years later von Menzel returned to Paris to attend the second Exposition Universelle in 1867 and it was during this stay in the French capital that he visited the Tuileries Gardens which is the subject for today’s painting. That same year he was decorated with the “Cross of the Légion d’honneur by Napoleon III for his service to the arts.

By the 1880’s von Menzel had established his international reputation as an artist and lithographer. In 1884 the Nationalgalerie in Berlin held the first major retrospective of von Menzel’s work to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of his career as an artist. In 1890, aged 70, he was given an honorary doctorate from Berlin University. He was bestowed with many other honours. He was made an honorary citizen of both Breslau and Berlin and made a member of both the Royal Academy of London and a member of the Akadémie des Beaux Arts, the Paris Academy. His greatest honour came in 1898 when he became the first artist to be admitted to the Order of the Black Eagle as a Knight, the highest order of chivalry in the Kingdom of Prussia.

Adolph von Menzel died in Berlin in 1905, aged 89.

My Daily Art Display featured painting today is entitled Afternoon at the Tuileries Garden by Adolph Menzel. He painted it in 1867 and now hangs in the National Gallery, London. It was following Menzel’s 1867 trip to Paris that he returned to his studio in Berlin with many sketches of the Tuileries Gardens, which lay across from the Louvre. He had become interested in painting scenes set in areas where society people pretentiously paraded and whilst in Paris was fascinated with the bustling social goings-on within the Gardens. The subject matter of his paintings were at this time often depicting bourgeois society and he, because of his fame as an artist, lived the lifestyle of this very grand bourgeois. Menzel’s painting is filled with detail and exudes a great deal of realism.

What I like about the works is that with so much going on in the painting your eyes flick from one group to another and every time you look at it your eyes focus on something different. I like the number of separate vignettes taking place. Let your eye wander up the centre of the painting and observe the little chubby girl being dragged off by the woman in blue. How often have we seen that! Dogs abound, in some cases having territorial disputes whilst the adults try their best to ignore such distractions and have only one thing in mind – to look their best! When the painting was first exhibited Menzel was at pains to tell everybody that it was done from his memories of his recent visit to the French capital.

Was it a work just from memory or was there something else which prompted Menzel to depict such a scene? In my next blog I will give you another possible motivation for Menzel’s depiction of the Tuileries Garden. Notwithstanding what inspired Menzel to paint this lively event, which is buzzing with activity, it is a fascinating work of art. I stood before it the other day and I was mesmerised by what I was looking at and as I said the other day, when talking about Caspar David Friedrich’s Winter Landscape, I was so pleased I had visited Room 41 of the gallery. The next time you visit the National Gallery; don’t forget to pay that particular room a visit. I guarantee you will not be disappointed.