Die Atelierwand

By 1872 Menzel was Berlin's official painter of Prussian glory, the man called on to record coronations and the new German Empire proclaimed the year before. Away from all that, he turned a candle-lit corner of his own studio into this. The red wall carries plaster casts he kept for study, portrait busts, a few death masks and life masks of friends, torsos, a dog, all lit sharply from below so the white faces seem to lean and watch. Menzel painted it fast and wet, wet on wet, and thought it his best work. Down in the lower left you can pick out the closed eyes of a cast taken from a face after death, hung in among the living ones he had modelled from friends.