The Artist's Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse
1851
Medium
Oil on cardboard
Dimensions
12 5/8 x 10 5/8 in. (32.1 x 27 cm)
Classification
Paintings
Department
European Paintings
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Purchase, Nineteenth-Century, Modern and Contemporary Funds, Leonora Brenauer Bequest, in memory of her father, Joseph B. Brenauer, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, and Paul L. and Marlene A. Herring and John D. Herring Gift, 2009
Accession Number
2009.64
Tags
Art Historical Context
Adolph Menzel's *The Artist's Sitting Room Ritterstrasse* (1851) offers an intimate glimpse into the daily life of this pioneering German Realist painter. Painted as a modest oil on cardboard—just 12⅝ × 10⅝ inches—this work captures the cluttered coziness of Menzel's Berlin apartment on Ritterstrasse, filled with everyday objects like books, papers, and personal effects. Created during a transformative period in European art, when Realism began challenging Romantic idealism, Menzel's interiors celebrated the beauty of ordinary domestic spaces amid Prussia's industrializing capital. Menzel's m...
About the Artist
Adolph Menzel
Adolph Menzel (1815–1905) was a German painter, draftsman, and printmaker who became the most celebrated German artist of the nineteenth century and one of the most technically accomplished realists in European art. Born Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), he moved to Berlin as a teenager and was largely self-taught, taking over his father's lithographic business ...