Adolph von Menzel

Adolph von Menzel built his early fame on the ghost of a king. Self-taught and running the family lithography shop in Berlin, he produced hundreds of illustrations of the life of Frederick the Great, the 18th-century Prussian ruler, and paintings like the Flute Concert, imagining the vanished court by candlelight with startling exactness.

Then in 1872 he did something few painters of his standing would touch. He travelled to an ironworks in Silesia, spent weeks sketching the furnaces, and painted the Iron Rolling Mill, a huge canvas of half-lit workers straining at glowing metal in the steam and noise of heavy industry. It is one of the first serious paintings of the modern factory.

Menzel was tiny, barely five feet tall, awkward in company, and drew compulsively all his life, filling sketchbooks with hands, faces, crumpled sheets, anything in front of him. By the time he died in 1905 he was the most honoured artist in Germany, and the Kaiser himself walked behind his coffin.