基辛根的花园

Adolph Menzel made this small gouache, barely the size of a postcard, at Bad Kissingen in 1885. Kissingen was then one of the grand Bavarian spa towns, where the well-off of Europe came each summer to drink the mineral waters and stroll the gardens between cures. Menzel was 70 that year, long famous in Berlin, and he went on holiday the way he did everything, with a sketchbook in hand. Here he catches an ordinary corner of the spa park: a woman under a parasol, a little dog, a fountain, a few trees. It is a private jotting rather than a picture made to sell, the kind of quick colour note he kept by the hundreds.