Gähnender Herr im Eisenbahncoupé

The railway carriage interior was among the new social spaces created by the industrial revolution, and Menzel documented it with the attentiveness he brought to all modern environments. This 1859 oil on canvas depicting a yawning gentleman in a railway compartment belongs to the intimate, informal vein of Menzel's observation — the private behavior made public by the enforced proximity of railway travel. Yawning was considered a breach of social decorum, and catching a fellow passenger in such an unselfconscious moment creates the gentle comedy that runs through much of Menzel's genre work. The railway compartment as social space was an object of fascination for many nineteenth-century European artists: its enclosed intimacy forced strangers of different social classes into proximity and created new forms of social interaction and observation. The Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, which holds this work, is Germany's leading collection of works on paper and graphic art, though this is an oil painting — its presence there may reflect institutional collecting patterns.

The railway compartment interior creates a tight, enclosed spatial problem: a box of limited depth filled with the figure of the yawning passenger. Menzel exploits the compartment's artificial light — perhaps dim daylight through a small window — to model his subject within a deliberately.