“The Balcony Room”
“The Balcony Room” is a beautiful and breezy oil on canvas painting by the German realist artist, Adolph von Menzel, also referred to as Adolph Menzel, from 1845. Menzel made this genre style painting when he was 30 years old. It is one of the first of a series of interior room scenes that he made between 1845 and 1848. The simplistic subject highlights the beauty of the mundane, an idea that wasn’t common at the time.
In this painting, Menzel depicts the interior of a room. It is commonly thought to be a room in Menzel’s apartment on Schöneberger Strasse in Berlin. The focus of the piece is the open window to the balcony. The curtains are billowing in along with sunlight, suggesting a bright and breezy day. An empty chair is seated near the window.
A mirror on the right gives a hint of the rest of the room reflecting what appears to be a sofa with a framed piece of art. Yet, it is still unclear which room is being depicted. The edge of a rug is seen on the left. Large swaths of the canvas are covered with visible brush strokes of paint, giving it an unfinished appearance.
Additionally, there are several points of perspective suggested by the light from the window and the line where the floor meets the wall along the back. This could be due to his lack of formal education. Menzel was mostly self-taught and was just beginning his long painterly career.
At the time, Menzel was creating large-scale history paintings of specific scenes of Frederick the Great for the Œuvres de Frédéric le Grand which was published between 1846 and 1856. This type of painting style was vastly different from his other work and suggests a spontaneity.
This piece is an example of a new type of art that was happening around this time, called ‘private’ art. With private art, an artist painted for the sheer joy of painting. Therefore, there were no obligations to adhere to current artistic conventions and no care of how an audience would perceive it. Though this painting is a finished piece, art critics of the day would have only seen this as a preparatory sketch, and not a finished piece.
These ‘private’ paintings were usually collected by the artist themselves, or their immediate friends and family. They were usually not displayed to the public until after the artist’s death, if at all. This painting, though made in 1845 and quite beautiful, wasn’t displayed until 1905 after Menzel’s death. It was first exhibited at an exhibition of his life’s work.
“The Balcony Room” is currently on display at the Nationalgalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin in Berlin, Germany.
For more on Adolph von Menzel, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
