One would have liked to have watched Adolph von Menzel draw: He must have set a high pace when he pulled out one of his sketchbooks, which he always carried in his coat pocket, and grasped a gesture or a fleeting situation - with every line sitting at the end.
"All drawing is useful and so is all drawing," the artist explained his affinity for working on paper.
It exercises the hand, trains the eye, and fills the memory and design store.
Menzel drew obsessively;
his sheets show a bravura that hardly any other artist of the 19th century achieved.
Together with Stephen Ongpin Fine Art from London, the Hamburg gallery Le Claire now conveys a good insight into this virtuosity in its rooms.
37 works from six decades can be seen.
One of the earliest is the charming watercolor portrait of "Fräulein Hanna Maerker" from 1848. Menzel must have worked standing up, as the slight overhead view of the nine-year-old girl reveals, looking up from a book under her straw hat (87,000 euros).
The latest work on offer was created in 1898 on behalf of the Berlin Academy of Arts as a farewell gift for the sculptor Reinhold Begas.
Using a carpenter's pencil, one of his favorite tools, Menzel drew three painterly shaded heads (150,000).
Ongpin received a significant part of the exhibits from an American private collection.
He added more sheets and showed everything accompanied by a carefully researched 2019 catalog in London.
According to the retailer, the public reacted surprised and impressed by the largely unknown product there, but also hesitantly in view of the price level set by the German and American markets.
Some exhibits are known from German trade.
the prices have risen, only a few papers have kept them or have become cheaper.
Among the latter is the picture of Emilie Fontane, the wife of Theodor Fontane.
The painter and the writer, both committed to realism, were friends.
Menzel writes to the person depicted reading under an umbrella on the back of the gouache and watercolor card,
which he apparently sent her as a gift for a lost "Very Love" bet.
In the game that was popular at the time, the winner was the one who, after dividing a double-seed nut, greeted the other with “Good morning, sweetie” first the next day.
The friendship certificate brought 100,000 euros to Grisebach in 2014, now it would be available for 97,000 euros.
Notable provenances also adorn a pencil view of Würzburg that belonged to Walter Rathenau (30,000) and the large gouache of a bearded man owned by the Geneva gallery owner and collector Jan Krugier and his wife Marie-Anne Poniatowski (128,000).
The friendship certificate brought 100,000 euros to Grisebach in 2014, now it would be available for 97,000 euros.
Notable provenances also adorn a pencil view of Würzburg that belonged to Walter Rathenau (30,000) and the large gouache of a bearded man owned by the Geneva gallery owner and collector Jan Krugier and his wife Marie-Anne Poniatowski (128,000).
The friendship certificate brought 100,000 euros to Grisebach in 2014, now it would be available for 97,000 euros.
Notable provenances also adorn a pencil view of Würzburg that belonged to Walter Rathenau (30,000) and the large gouache of a bearded man owned by the Geneva gallery owner and collector Jan Krugier and his wife Marie-Anne Poniatowski (128,000).
Menzel's detailed studies can be just as fascinating as the meticulously worked through sheets.
As simple as the subject is, as great is the power of the back view of a man bent over (65,000).
With an almost abstract appearance, she must have prepared a figure from the oil painting "Piazza d'Erbe in Verona" from the Dresden New Masters Gallery.
In the same picture there is a female figure that Menzel captured with a carpenter's pencil in her long coat in 1882 (48,000).
Menzel, who often accompanied his sister and her family to the bathing resort, created a number of sketches for the painting “Grinding shop in the court smithy in Hofgastein”, now in the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
A cross marks the study of the man at the grindstone, which the painter chose to have executed in oil (52,000).
As well as the shirt-sleeved worker, Menzel's incorruptible eye captures a lady who is spooning soup out of a cup and leaning forward so as not to soil her ball gown (60,000).
Menzel literally distinguished himself through all social classes;
but on his hikes he also dedicated many a page in his sketchbook to nature and landscape.
"Drawings, watercolors and gouaches by Adolph von Menzel"
, Le Claire Kunst, Hamburg, until October 7th