The Artist's Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse

Painted in 1851 on cardboard and held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'The Artist's Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse' is one of the most celebrated of Menzel's private domestic observations, showing the sitting room of his Berlin apartment bathed in the specific quality of daylight he was learning to observe with unprecedented analytical precision. The Ritterstraße apartment was his base in the late 1840s and early 1850s, and several of the most radical of his domestic observation paintings were made there. The Metropolitan's possession of this work — outside Germany — reflects the international reassessment of Menzel's achievement that followed the posthumous discovery of his private works. The painting captures the character of a specific interior at a specific time of day with a directness that was revolutionary for its moment.

Daylight from an unseen window structures the composition, creating a progression from bright illuminated surfaces to deep shadow. Furniture receives attention proportional to the light it receives; the cardboard support adds an intimate textural variation in thinner passages.