Press release: March 2006

National Gallery Acquires Painting by Menzel

Adolph Menzel (1815-1905)
'An Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens', 1867
Oil on canvas, 49 x 70 cm

The National Gallery has bought 'An Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens' by Adolph Menzel for £3.2 million - the first painting by this key 19th century German artist to enter a UK collection.

The National Gallery identified the work of Menzel (1815-1905) as a priority for acquisition several years ago, in a bid to widen its 19th century collection with non-French works. Due to the fact major collections in Germany acquired Menzel's paintings from an early date, very few of them are to be found beyond its borders.

'An Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens' is a particularly apt Menzel purchase for the National Gallery. It is thought the artist painted it after seeing Edouard Manet's painting 'Music in the Tuileries Gardens' (1862) at an exhibition in Paris in 1867 - this Manet work entered the National Gallery collection in 1917 as part of the Lane Bequest. Both paintings share a fascination with the bustling social scene of the day in the Parisian Tuileries Gardens, but are executed in strikingly different styles.

'An Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens' hung in the Galerie Neue Meister of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden for 70 years. The gallery acquired the painting in 1935 from the family of Fritz Meyer, a Jewish banker from Berlin, who had purchased it from Menzel himself in 1868.

Early in 2005, and following concerns over the 1935 sale, 'An Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens' was returned to Meyer's descendants. They then sold the painting to an American collector, in partnership with a Munich art dealer.

'An Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens' will be hung in Room 43 of the National Gallery, London on 2 March 2006, beside Manet's painting 'Music in the Tuileries Gardens'. The painting will eventually move to Room 41 (in approximately two weeks' time.)

Notes to editors:

Adolph Menzel (1815-1905) is the leading German artist of the second half of the 19th century. Active first as a printmaker, and a dazzling draughtsman throughout his prolific career, he turned to oil painting only after he was thirty.

When they were first exhibited early in the 20th century, his oil sketches of the 1840s showed that he had anticipated some of the effects of French Impressionism thirty years before the Impressionists. The minutely-observed scenes of modern life established him as an excellent chronicler of high and low life in his adopted city, Berlin. He also travelled restlessly across Europe in pursuit of visual and aesthetic stimulation. 'An Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens' is the result of a Paris visit where he assessed, not uncritically, all that was new in the art capital of the world.

The National Gallery's 2001 exhibition, 'Spirit of an Age: Ninteenth-Century Paintings from the Nationalgalerie Berlin', included more paintings by Menzel than by any other artist, and an entire room was dedicated to him.

For further press information please contact:
Tracy Jones
020 7747 2512 | tracy.jones@ng-london.org.uk

For images ONLY please contact:
Louise Butler
020 7747 2596 | louise.butler@ng-london.org.uk

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