La stanza del balcone

In 1845 Adolph Menzel, then about 30, painted an almost empty room in his family's Berlin apartment. A breeze lifts the curtains at an open balcony door, a sofa catches the light, and a mirror shows a little of what we cannot see directly. Nothing happens. There is no story, no lesson, no one in the room. Menzel made it for himself, not for buyers or exhibitions, and pictures like this stayed in his studio. The public did not see The Balcony Room until after he died in 1905, when it looked startlingly close to the loose, light-filled painting that had meanwhile become modern. It records an ordinary corner of his own home on an ordinary day.