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Far away from the Frenchified classical grandeur of Frederick the Great, for whom the Sanssouci Palace was built in Potsdam, is the bourgeois apparatus of Frederick William III, seen in his "Gothic Moroccan" Palm Court on the on the Pfaueninsel (Peacock Island, an island situated in the Havel river near the Berlin Wannsee). Designed in an opulent late Regency style, this building is a reminder of the many marital and cultural links between Prussia and England.
The Palm Court was unusually realistically recorded in Blechen's canvas commissioned in 1832 by the arch-conservative king as a gift for his daughter, the Czarina Charlotte. Her collection of German nineteenth-century art is mostly in The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.
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