A couple conversing, another figure in the background

Executed a year before Menzel's death, this sheet comes from one of the notebooks, the size of pocket diaries, which the artist carried with him at all times. Executed with his left hand, the drawings are in soft graphite which he stumped. Depicting aged people became a favourite theme which reflected his own sense of loneliness. He invited old men and women to his studio and sketched them in a dream-like way with enigmatic facial expressions which give a very distinct tone to his late production. Similar sheets are in Berlin, Washington, National Gallery of Art, Adolph Menzel 1815-1905, exhib. cat., 1997, nos. 215-216.