Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel (8 December 1815 – 9 February 1905) was a German Realist artist noted for drawings, etchings, and paintings.

[3] Menzel's graphic work (and especially his drawings) were more widely disseminated; these, along with informal paintings not initially intended for display, have largely accounted for his posthumous reputation.

[2] Although he traveled in order to find subjects for his art, to visit exhibitions, and to meet with other artists, Menzel spent most of his life in Berlin, and was, despite numerous friendships, by his own admission detached from others.

[4] Louis Friedrich Sachse [de] of Berlin published his first work in 1833, an album of pen-and-ink drawings reproduced on stone, to illustrate Goethe's little poem, Kunstlers Erdenwallen.

[7] From 1839 to 1842, he produced 400 drawings, largely introducing to Germany the technique of wood-engraving, to illustrate the Geschichte Friedrichs des Grossen (History of Frederick the Great) by Franz Kugler.

"[17] The paintings which were available to the public garnered recognition not only within Germany, but from the French avant-garde as well: Edgar Degas admired and copied his work, calling him "the greatest living master",[18] and Louis Edmond Duranty wrote of his art: In a word, the man is everywhere independent, sincere, with sure vision, a decisive note that can sometimes be a little brutal....While being perfectly healthy he has the neurosis of truthfulness....The man who has measured with a compass the buttons on a uniform from the time of Frederick, when it is a matter of depicting a modern shoe, waistcoat, or coiffure, does not make them by approximations but totally, in their absolute form and without smallness of means.

[19]Notwithstanding Menzel's professed estrangement from others, his renown entailed social obligations, and in the 1880s the poet Jules Laforgue described him as "no taller than a cuirassier-guard's boot, bedecked with pendants and orders, not missing a single one of these parties, moving among all these personages like a gnome and like the greatest enfant terrible for the chronicler.

Das Labyrinth der Wirklichkeit", Nationalgalerie (National Gallery) and Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings), Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 7 Feb – 11 May 1997[22] "Menzel.

Maler auf Papier", Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings), Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 20 September 2019 – 19 January 2020.