Adolph von Menzel

Sale, Berlin, Galerie Bassenge, 2 December 1995, lot 5862;

Wolfgang Ratjen, Munich;

David Lachenmann, Munich;

Katrin Bellinger, Munich;

with Flavia Ormond Fine Arts Ltd., London and New York, Old Master Drawings, 1999, no. 22,

Charles Ryskamp, New York (acquired from the above in 1999),

William Louis-Dreyfus, Mount Kisco, New York (acquired from the above in 2008),

The Louis-Dreyfus Family Collections (by descent from the above in 2016)

W. Griswold et al., The World Observed: Five Centuries of Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp, exhib. cat., New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, 2001, p. 115, no. 103, reproduced

New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, The World Observed: Five Centuries of Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp, 2001, no. 103;

Hamburg, Le Claire Kunst, ‘A World caught with the eye and held by the pencil’: Drawings by Adolph Menzel, 2019, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, no. 34

Menzel’s aptitude and dexterity as a draughtsman is effortlessly captured in this spirited sketch, previously in the collection of the late American museum director and taste maker, Charles Ryskamp. Though the studies remain unrelated to any finished work in Menzel’s surviving oeuvre they can be tentatively associated with a drawing previously on the German art market, depicting two women, one of whom holds a glass in an almost identical manner.¹

^1.Sale, Berlin, Galerie Bassenge, 1 June 2018, lot 6715