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Lot Essay
Adolph von Menzel’s Coffee time in Kissingen of 1886 belongs to the artist’s celebrated late gouaches, works in which his unparalleled powers of observation are matched by a dazzling freedom of execution. Painted during one of Menzel’s visits to the fashionable spa town of Bad Kissingen, the present sheet captures the lively sociability of bourgeois leisure with extraordinary immediacy and wit.
Animated by elegantly dressed figures, bustling children and fleeting gestures observed with almost journalistic acuity, the composition exemplifies Menzel’s fascination with modern life. Rather than constructing an idealised scene, the artist records the spontaneous rhythms of everyday experience: Menzel here captures something of the lively bustle of the spa town, with the artist an amused observer as a young boy attempts to pick up a struggling baby and a man is confronted by a dog tugging at its leash, while fashionable visitors gather beneath the shaded arcades of the Kurpark café. The painting’s apparent informality conceals an exceptionally sophisticated orchestration of movement and colour.
The Franconian spa town of Bad Kissingen, near Würzburg, was frequented by Menzel’s sister Emilie Krigar-Menzel and her family, and the artist often accompanied them there. He spent much of his time in Kissingen making drawings of the surroundings as well as the visitors to the spa. As has been noted of the artist, ‘In his old age he seems to have appreciated the bourgeois tranquillity of the spa and a number of drawings as well as numerous gouaches show that the place provided a constant stream of subjects.’ (C. Keisch and M.U. Riemann-Reyher, (eds.), Adolph Menzel 1815-1905: Between Romanticism and Impressionism, exh. cat., Washington, 1996-1997, p.421). Menzel often stayed at the Villa Hailmann at Kurhausstraße 3 (today Martin-Luther-Straße 9) in Kissingen, and from the window of one of the rooms he could look down onto the spa garden with its fountain. It was this view that the artist recorded in another small gouache, of similar dimensions to the present sheet and dated the previous year, of a Lady Walking by a Fountain in the Kissingen Spa Garden, today in the collection of the Muzeum Narodowe in Warsaw.
Although Menzel had first painted a genre subject set in Kissingen in a watercolour of 1874, it was not until the following decade that he produced several small-format gouaches of subjects in the spa town, of which this delightful Coffee Time in Kissingen of 1886 is a very fine example.
The present work reflects the extraordinary vitality of Menzel’s late style, when his small-scale works on paper achieved an almost modern spontaneity. Intimate in scale yet monumental in observation, Coffee time in Kissingen stands as a masterful evocation of Wilhelmine society at leisure, rendered by one of the most penetrating observers of nineteenth-century Europe.
Animated by elegantly dressed figures, bustling children and fleeting gestures observed with almost journalistic acuity, the composition exemplifies Menzel’s fascination with modern life. Rather than constructing an idealised scene, the artist records the spontaneous rhythms of everyday experience: Menzel here captures something of the lively bustle of the spa town, with the artist an amused observer as a young boy attempts to pick up a struggling baby and a man is confronted by a dog tugging at its leash, while fashionable visitors gather beneath the shaded arcades of the Kurpark café. The painting’s apparent informality conceals an exceptionally sophisticated orchestration of movement and colour.
The Franconian spa town of Bad Kissingen, near Würzburg, was frequented by Menzel’s sister Emilie Krigar-Menzel and her family, and the artist often accompanied them there. He spent much of his time in Kissingen making drawings of the surroundings as well as the visitors to the spa. As has been noted of the artist, ‘In his old age he seems to have appreciated the bourgeois tranquillity of the spa and a number of drawings as well as numerous gouaches show that the place provided a constant stream of subjects.’ (C. Keisch and M.U. Riemann-Reyher, (eds.), Adolph Menzel 1815-1905: Between Romanticism and Impressionism, exh. cat., Washington, 1996-1997, p.421). Menzel often stayed at the Villa Hailmann at Kurhausstraße 3 (today Martin-Luther-Straße 9) in Kissingen, and from the window of one of the rooms he could look down onto the spa garden with its fountain. It was this view that the artist recorded in another small gouache, of similar dimensions to the present sheet and dated the previous year, of a Lady Walking by a Fountain in the Kissingen Spa Garden, today in the collection of the Muzeum Narodowe in Warsaw.
Although Menzel had first painted a genre subject set in Kissingen in a watercolour of 1874, it was not until the following decade that he produced several small-format gouaches of subjects in the spa town, of which this delightful Coffee Time in Kissingen of 1886 is a very fine example.
The present work reflects the extraordinary vitality of Menzel’s late style, when his small-scale works on paper achieved an almost modern spontaneity. Intimate in scale yet monumental in observation, Coffee time in Kissingen stands as a masterful evocation of Wilhelmine society at leisure, rendered by one of the most penetrating observers of nineteenth-century Europe.