What we know about the private Adolph Menzel comes from Paul Friedrich Meyerheim, himself a painter, he published his memoirs on Menzel shortly after Menzel's death in 1906. Paul, born in 1842, was the son of Eduard Meyerheim, the respected Berlin genre painter, with whom Menzel had been friends since 1834 and had an artistic exchange. Meyerheim painted Menzel's portrait around 1840, who in turn portrayed Meyerheim's wife Karoline in 1847, the sister of the sculptor Friedrich Drake, who was friends with Menzel. Over the years, a multiple exchange developed with Paul, both artistically and privately. Both were united by their interest in animal and zoo motifs, and when Menzel's famous iron rolling mill was built in the early 1870s, Meyerheim was working on a cycle on the “History of a Locomotive” for the Borsig industrial family. Paul reports in great detail about Menzel's visit to the world exhibition in Paris in 1867, where Meyerheim was already staying and had prepared Menzel's stay. They roamed the city "to the extreme slack" and what is known about Menzel's encounters with Meissonier and Courbet, we know from Meyerheim's little book. Our little portrait of our friend comes from the following year, in which Menzel visited Paris again, this time without Meyerheim. It shows Meyerheim thoughtfully turned to the right with a distinctive profile; the portrait inserted into the oval and kept in dark colors - "the only concession to a color of its own is found in the ingenious treatment of the patterned tie" (Claude Keisch). One thinks one can sense echoes of similar portraits of Courbet or French contemporaries from a distance. It is uncertain whether the painting was in the possession of the sitter. In 1905 it did not appear at the large commemorative exhibition for which Meyerheim was the lender, and it was not listed in Meyerheim's estate, which was auctioned off by Rudolph Lepke in Berlin in 1916 and 1919 - it did not appear in the Abraham Adelsberger collection until 1930 back on. With a report by Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher, Berlin, dated December 11, 1996 (copy).

Copy of the description from karlundfaber