An Elderly Lady in Profile
  • Adolph von Menzel
  • Breslau 1815 - 1905 Berlin
  • An Elderly Lady in Profile, 1892
  • Carpenter’s pencil, partly smeared
  • monogrammed and dated on the upper right: A.M./92.
  • 209 × 130 mm
Provenance:
Dr. H. Gurlitt, Hamburg,
Gertrud Reemstsma, Hamburg (purchased 1939),
Alen Müller-Hellwig, Lübeck (as a present 1970)
Exhibition:
Berlin, Königliche National-Galerie 1905,
Adolph von Menzel, cat. no. 5425

This drawing is considered a preparatory detail study for Menzel’s Breakfast Buffet of the Pastry Shop at Kissingen from 1893 (Fig.1). A woman with the same hairstyle and bonnet appears in the righthand portion of the picture, serving herself from the open buffet. Many of the approximately 25 pencil sketches that have up to now been identified as studies for this gouache were made as early as 1892.

Menzel had regularly visited the spa town since 1874, but even here was more of an observer than a vacationer. The level of detail he captured in the fashions and hairstyles of the ladies was casually transcended in the overall composition, according to his method: for the sake of creative “truth to nature,” the documentation of details must be internalized, only to be “forgotten” in the act of painting itself.