About their “brushy”-ness, I believe it has to do with a few factors. First, the images I chose were mainly drawings, chalk, gouache, or oil on paper. (I added two more paintings just a moment ago.) With those media, it’s hard to get a finished surface like that of an oil on canvas or oil on board and, therefore, regardless of the painter, will most often reveal more of the artist’s stroke. Second, ant-academic and pro-impressionist art historian often like to say that one of the reasons the Impressionists didn’t get along with the academic painters was because their paintings didn’t look glassy and showed their strokes. This assumes that all academic painters had glassy finishes, which isn’t true.Breton, Meissonier, and Old Maters like Titian and Velázquez regularly showed their brush strokes. To be fair, and for the last point, Menzel was not a hardcore academician, though he taught at the Academy in Berlin. He was more of a realist. The verisimilitude of his work required a kind of ambiguity that a classicist working in the ideal would change.