The Dinner at the Ball

Painted in 1878 and held in the Alte Nationalgalerie, 'The Dinner at the Ball' is one of Menzel's most admired social observation paintings, capturing the supper interval at a formal ball where the hierarchies and social theatre of the evening momentarily relax in the more intimate context of dining. The painting belongs to the group of high-society subjects he pursued from the late 1860s through the 1880s, in which the newly unified German Empire's court and bourgeois society is documented with a combination of sympathy and ironic clarity. The density of the crowd, the variety of individual responses to the social situation, and the warm artificial lighting create a canvas of remarkable complexity and vitality. This work established Menzel as the supreme painter of modern German social life.

Menzel populates the canvas with a dense crowd of diners whose individual characterisation is achieved through precisely observed physiognomy, costume, and gesture. Artificial gas light creates the warm tonality of the scene, with complex reflections across tableware and formal dress.