Three Fallen Soldiers in a Barn / The Mortuary at Königinhof

Menzel travelled on 16 July 1866 to significant sites of the six-week Austro-Prussian War, which had broken out one month previously. He hoped ‘to get at least a whiff of the war’, or so he wrote in a letter dated 31 July 1866 to Heinrich Paul while travelling back to Berlin. For three days, Menzel saw for himself the conflict’s impact in the north Bohemian town of Königinhof: men dying in the military hospital, a barn converted into a mortuary. The experience inspired three pencil-and-ink-wash drawings, which refrain from any form of glorification to focus instead upon the horrors and true face of war. This personal experience of war resulted in the artist’s decision after 1866 never again to use war as a theme for historical paintings, as the artist confided to Friedrich Pecht in 1878.