Impression VI (Sonntag)

Kandinsky painted this in 1911, a hinge year in his life in Munich. It belongs to a group of six canvases he called Impressions, each begun from something he had actually seen. Here the subject is a Sunday. A couple in their best clothes, the man in a stiff round hat, the woman under a broad hat of her own, come toward us with a small white dog trotting ahead, a park dissolving into loose colour behind them. You can still read the scene, though only just. In that same year Kandinsky finished his book On the Spiritual in Art and, with the painter Franz Marc, founded the Blaue Reiter group in Munich.