Adolph Menzel, 'Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens', 1867.
London, The National Gallery.

Recent Acquisition

'Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens'

1867

Adolph Menzel
(1815-1905)

NG6604

Room 41

The National Gallery has bought 'Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens' by Adolph Menzel - the first painting by this artist to enter a UK collection.

Adolph Menzel 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. His 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.

'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.

'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, '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.

The National Gallery identified the work of Menzel 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 that major collections in Germany acquired Menzel's paintings from an early date, very few of them are to be found beyond its borders.

Bought with grants from the American Friends of the National Gallery, London, and the George Beaumont Group, 2006.

Oil on canvas, 49 x 70 cm

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