# The Allegiance of the Silesian Diet before Frederick II in Breslau [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [MENZEL, Adolph von]() - Date: 1851-1900 - Technique: Oil on canvas, 98 x 136 cm ## Commentary Menzel's oils of the 1850s and 1860s presented dazzling tableaux of a vastly wealthy, conspicuously refined Potsdam court under Frederick the Great \(1712-1786\), depicted as if on the same gargantuan plane as Versailles, in a Prussian palace more French than the one near Paris. The Allegiance of the Silesian Diet before Frederick II in Breslau, signed and dated 1855, is an early example. His habitually powerful re-creative imagination makes these canvases look as if he were working after a lost depiction of the subject by an eyewitness. Knowing his audience required a massively detailed approach, Menzel turned to a Dutch seventeenth-century precedent - the skilled reportage and engaged eye of Gerard Terborch, whose work was still very popular in the nineteenth century. ## Related artworks - [A Flute Concert of Frederick the Great at Sanssouci]() - [Afternoon at the Tuileries Garden \(detail\)]() - [Afternoon at the Tuileries Garden]() - [Living-Room with the Artist's Sister]() - [Moonlight on the Friedrichskanal in Old Berlin]() - [Rear of House and Backyard]() - [Sister Emily Sleeping]() - [Sister Emily Sleeping]() - [Storm on Tempelhof Mountain]() - [Studio Interior with Casts]() - [Study of a Woman with a Fan]() - [Théatre du Gymnase]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()