Portrait of a woman looking down to the right

Menzel was a remarkable draftsman. In the last decades of his life he drew a large number of informal, close-up portraits, in graphite or black chalk. These portraits were not of friends, but of people he saw in the streets of Berlin. In these drawings, like in the present one, the heads are often portrayed in profile, or seen from the back, or from other unusual angles. In his works Menzel aspired to capture a fleeting moment, the fragility and sometimes the melancholy of the sitter, as he does in this work.

This drawing was in the collection of the renowned art historian Max J. Friedländer, director of the Berlin Museum until 1933. Professor Friedländer, a contemporary of Menzel, was the author of a celebrated fourteen-volume publication on Early Netherlandish painting.