Along with the painting-within-a-painting, he featured the unmade bed. Never mind if it looks messy and there's wet oil paint everywhere: the morning light looks gorgeous on the linen sheets and on the white shirt thrown over the edge of the bed.
Adolph Menzel drew this bed in 1845, using a stump to soften the folds of the bedclothes. Menzel himself never married, but that didn't stop him from infusing many of his drawings with a sensuous, animated feeling. Without sacrificing naturalism, Menzel's drawing seems almost alive. The pillows appear to be on the verge of waking up themselves, as if they are reaching over and nuzzling the duvet.
Menzel expert Michael Fried accounts for this quality by suggesting that Menzel projected his bodily memories of what it felt like "to rest his own head in the pillows, to to draw the duvet over his reclining body, to fall asleep, to wake, and so on, in combination, of course, with his unique ability to project those feelings back into the drawing taking shape under his hand."
Big collection of Sargent links at Making a Mark
Book: Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin
Appreciation of the Sargent painting by Garin Baker
Menzel expert Michael Fried accounts for this quality by suggesting that Menzel projected his bodily memories of what it felt like "to rest his own head in the pillows, to to draw the duvet over his reclining body, to fall asleep, to wake, and so on, in combination, of course, with his unique ability to project those feelings back into the drawing taking shape under his hand."
Big collection of Sargent links at Making a Mark
Book: Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin
Appreciation of the Sargent painting by Garin Baker
