2-725-036 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Bust of a Woman, Seen from Behind, 1893. In the last two decades of his life, Menzel executed numerous studies of heads of models. Here tonal gradations, from velvety blacks to the palest gray, create a rich effect. The immediacy of the image-the illuminated profile with a mouth slightly open-suggests how the artist captured a fleeting moment. Such drawings are, as the artist wrote, "true to nature" without "being copied from nature with fearful exactitude."