menzel

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Sermon in the Beechwood near Kösen

1868

Adolph Menzel (1815-1905)

By permission of Szépmüvészeti Müzeum Budapest

“The town of Kösen was situated not far from Naumburg, through which flows the River Saale, rich in Romantic connotations … From 1815 onwards, the town was frequently visited as a spa, and after 1860 offered salt water baths to the public. Menzel had often used such a remedy, as indicated in the long letters he wrote when he was taking the waters at Freienwalde in 1861, and stayed at Kösen several times with his family in 1865. The parish was created after 1860, on account of the growing number of people taking the waters there, and for a long time there was only a temporary place of worship. Services were held in a beech clearing, whose foliage formed a kind of vault, on the road to the picturesque medieval ruins of Rudelsburg. These services were sometimes organized by the [Lutheran] Gustav-Adolph Society, created in 1832, which collected funds to finance missions in non-European countries. … In Menzel’s painting, the whole composition, from foreground to background, is movement, inattentiveness, centrifugal force, social chit-chat, and bourgeois vanity. While a lady of some social standing hastily looks for her place in the front row, others leave, breaking up the angle of the painting. An empty space occupies the center of the composition, but it is also dominated all the more freely by an extremely fragmented light, which seems to have to force its way through the large space between the tree-trunks and thickets.”

(Quoted from Adolph Menzel, 1815-1905, ed. Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher [New Haven: Yale UP, 1996], pp. 338-39)