Das Flötenkonzert Friedrichs des Großen in Sanssouci

Menzel finished this in 1852, more than 60 years after the man in it had died, and it belongs to a wave of German fascination with Frederick the Great, the Prussian king who played the flute and kept musicians at his palace of Sanssouci. Frederick stands at the centre, mid-solo, in a hall lit entirely by candlelight. And that light was the real reason Menzel painted it. He admitted later that he had made the whole picture mostly for the chandelier, for the challenge of all those flames and the way they catch the gilt, the mirrors and the silk. So the history-painting subject is almost an excuse. What Menzel is chasing is the exact behaviour of candlelight in a grand 18th-century room. It hangs in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.