Editing Adolph Menzel (section)

==Later years==
[[File:Giovanni Boldini (Ferrara, 31 dicembre 1842 – Parigi, 11 gennaio 1931) - il pittore Adolf Menzel (1895) - Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlino.jpg|thumb|1895 portrait of Menzel by [[Giovanni Boldini]], Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin]]

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",<ref>Keisch, et al, front cover flap</ref> and [[Louis Edmond Duranty]] wrote of his art:

<blockquote>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. He puts there everything that is called for by the character (of the object). Free, large, and rapid in his drawing, no draftsman is as ''definitive'' as he.<ref>Fried, 130</ref></blockquote>

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."<ref name="f9">Fried, 9</ref> In Germany he received many honors, and in 1898 became the first painter to be admitted to the [[Order of the Black Eagle]];{{sfn|Chisholm|1911|p=147}} by virtue of receiving the Order, Menzel was raised to the nobility, becoming "Adolph von Menzel".  He was also made a member of the [[Académie des Beaux-Arts]] in Paris and the [[Royal Academy]] in London. After his death in 1905 in Berlin, his funeral arrangements were directed by the Kaiser, who walked behind his coffin.<ref name="f10">Fried, 10</ref>