The Back Garden

Painted in 1850 and held in the Detroit Institute of Arts, 'The Back Garden' continues Menzel's sustained investigation of the outdoor spaces immediately adjacent to his Berlin apartment buildings — the rear courtyards, back gardens, and shared spaces of the urban block that were invisible in the city's public face. These spaces, unglamorous and private, were transformed through his observational practice into subjects of genuine pictorial interest. The back garden as a subject allowed him to study natural forms and outdoor light in a context stripped of the aesthetic conventions that attached to more conventionally picturesque landscape subjects. The Detroit Institute's possession of this German work reflects the cosmopolitan collecting that built the museum's European holdings. The back gardens and rear courtyards that Menzel observed from his studio windows in the 1840s and 1850s have become, in retrospect, among the most significant private subjects in European Realism.

The back garden is rendered with the direct tonal observation characteristic of Menzel's private outdoor subjects — light falling on plantings, walls, and ground without the picturesque selection that conventionally organised outdoor subjects.