Falke, eine Taube schlagend

This one was painted to be shot at. In 1844 the Berlin artist Adolph Menzel, then in his late twenties, made it as a target for a shooting club: a falcon plunging from the top corner onto a white pigeon that seems to flare up from the left just beneath it, the whole struggle filling the frame edge to edge. Restorers later found and repaired numerous bullet holes in the canvas, so the marksmen really did use it. Menzel would become one of the most exact observers in German painting, forever sketching what was in front of him. Berlin's National Gallery bought this early, odd survivor in 1906, the year after he died.