Study of a coach

As recorded in the artist’s own inscription, this drawing depicts the coach in which King Wilhelm I of Prussia, who became German Emperor in 1871, ‘drove to the station on 31 July 1870’. This was just a few days before the invasion of Germany by the French in the Franco-Prussian war, and the day when Wilhelm drove to the Berlin-Potsdam railway station to travel to the battlefield. Menzel made the King's coach trip through Berlin the subject of a painting dated 1871, now in the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin (inv. A I 323; see C. Keisch in Adolph Menzel 1815-1905. Between Romanticism and Impressionism, exhib. cat., Paris, Musée d’Orsay, Washington, National Gallery of Art, and Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie, 1996-1997, no. 134, ill.). Several other drawings related to the event are known (ibid., p. 354, n. 10).