The Jewish Cemetery in Prague

Essentially an observer and uncompromising realist seeking to show things as they really are, Menzel often traveled for exploration and research, returning home with notebooks filled with new ideas for paintings. He was primarily a graphic artist, employing line to the utmost richness of effect, as is manifest in The Jewish Cemetery in Prague. The tangled vegetation – an allusion to the inexorable passage of time – is evocative of the Romantic “bizarre,” while the fine lines of the tree and its branches may show signs of Japanese influence; in the early 1850s Japan had just been opened to the West, and Menzel may have adopted elements of Japanese art. Created by the artist during a trip to Prague in the summer of 1852, this drawing – together with two other works devoted to the same subject – records Menzel's fascination with the Jewish community in Prague.