The princely hall in the city castle at Eisenach
  • Richard Müller
  • Tschirnitz / Bohemia 1874 -1954 Dresden
  • The princely hall in the city castle at Eisenach, 1935
  • Carpenter‘s pencil, partly smeared, on strong paper
  • signed and dated: Rich. Müller 1935
  • cat. rais. Z 1935.49
  • 316 × 224 mm
Provenance:
estate of the artist

Richard Müller also created the following masterly drawing of the Princely Hall in the City Castle at Eisenach in 1935, during a journey through Thuringia. With infinite meticulousness and attention to detail, he succeeded in depicting on this sheet the subtlest nuances of light, such as on the covered walls of the High Baroque interior, on the gilded picture frames, and as reflections of the lacquered doors on the highly-polished parquet floor. Despite the relatively monochromatic nature of the artist‘s graphic medium, with only pencil and black chalk at his disposal, the room vibrates in many shades; it is not only the view into an adjacent salon that creates a fully plastic sense of space here. Each of the patterns of the different surfaces on paintings, wall coverings, and stuccowork, as well as on the parquet and gilded woodwork, testify to the incredible hand of Richard Müller, the rather manic graphic artist.

The city castle still dominates the north side of the Eisenach marketplace. It was originally built, beginning in 1743, as a four-winged complex in the late Baroque style, following the demolition of an older court elsewhere. The castle later served as a residence for the Dukes of Saxe-Eisenach, and was thereafter used by the Grand-Ducal Family of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach as an imposing venue for their state visits until 1918.