Lineage of Corot · German · 1815 to 1905

Adolph Menzel

The greatest pencil draughtsman of the nineteenth century, who drew everything, all the time, with a carpenter's pencil.

Menzel, a tiny Berliner who never stopped drawing, filled more than seventy sketchbooks with the most searching pencil studies ever made: hands, railings, boots, a cathedral vault, a dying man's head, a plaster cast, a rolling mill, all with the same ferocious attention. Degas revered him. He used a broad carpenter's pencil, pressed hard, and built his darks by burnishing the graphite into the paper.

He is here because he is the standard for what graphite can do when the person holding it refuses to approximate. A Menzel study of a window or a staircase is a lesson in drawing only what is there, at the scale it is there, with the pressure it needs. For the Line side of this program he is the ceiling.

Art Institute of Chicago

Menzel, Sluice, 1885. Graphite with stumping on ivory wove paper.

The Art Institute of Chicago · Mr. and Mrs. Henry C. Woods Fund

What to steal

1Draw what is in front of you, not what you know is there.
2Pressure as a tool: lean on the soft grades until the paper shines, then put a hard grade over it for the edge.
3Everything is worth drawing. A railing is as serious as a cathedral.