Focus on The Balcony Room and discuss the History.
Menzel painted numerous paintings of interior views until 1848. This room belonged to the Menzel family's apartment on Schöneberger Strasse, at the time on the south-eastern outskirts of Berlin, where the artist lived with his mother and siblings. During this time he also made the illustrations for the multi-volume history of Frederick the Great by Franz Theodor Kugler (until 1842), which marked his artistic breakthrough. In Kugler's work, Menzel had already used the motif of a door letting light through in chapter 42. It is a woodcut of the round library in Sanssouci Palace, which shows the windows that reach down to the floor flooded with light. In addition to the picture from this apartment, Menzel made other pictures of the apartments in Ritterstrasse and Marienstraße.
Franz Theodor Kugler Frederick the Great Berlin