Stiefel

1830

The family moves to Berlin

The Menzels moved from Breslau to Berlin, the city where the artist would spend most of his life.

1833

His father dies; Adolph becomes the breadwinner

On his father's death the young Menzel became the family's breadwinner and took any work going, drawing dinner menus and invitation cards; by other accounts his father died in 1832, when the son took over the lithographic business.

1833

The album “An Artist's Life” brings first renown

Menzel first became known for a notebook of pen drawings, “An Artist's Life” (by other accounts an album illustrating a poem by Goethe, published by Louis Friedrich Sachse). He attended the Berlin Academy of Art for only six months and was otherwise almost entirely self-taught.

1839–1842

400 drawings for the “History of Frederick the Great”

For Franz Kugler's book Menzel produced 400 drawings, largely introducing the technique of wood engraving to Germany; with the Frederick books that followed, they made him one of the first, if not the first, illustrator of his day.

1840s

Begins painting from life

A whole series of landscapes and portraits painted from life appeared; they would first be shown only at the 1906 exhibition at the National Gallery in Berlin, and they sharply changed the accepted view of his art.

9 February 1905

Died