Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens

In the summer of 1867 Paris was hosting a Universal Exhibition, and Menzel spent nine weeks in the city. Manet, left out of the official show, put up his own pavilion nearby with around 50 paintings, among them Music in the Tuileries Gardens, which the National Gallery also owns. A crowd drawing in Menzel's Paris sketchbook shows he saw it. Back in Berlin he painted his reply, first exhibited with the words from memory in its title, and beside his signature he added an abbreviation for Berlin. He borrowed a man in a top hat seen in profile and a child crouching in the foreground, then did almost everything else his own way. Paths run deep between the trees, and the crowd mixes ages, classes and nationalities, where the Frenchman kept mostly to one well-off Parisian set.