The Artist’s Bedroom in Ritterstraße

Two years after The Balcony Room, Menzel used the same format apparently to combine two favorite motifs of the time: the interior view and the view from a window. In this work, the two both balance and compete with eachother. Contrary to expectation, the viewer’s gaze is hurried past the foreground with its large forms, broad brush strokes, and marked perspectives to the scene in the distance with its back yard and houses, which are more detailed, sharper, and more colorful than the foreground. The shape less mass of the bed, that seems to heave ponderously under the thin folds of the coverlet, takes up almost the entire lower half of the picture. The distant idyll of every day life is cut off from the viewer by a distinctly hostile zone.