Alte Stadt II

In 1902 Kandinsky was still years away from the abstractions that made him famous. He had given up a career in law in Moscow, moved to Munich to study painting, and was traveling through the old towns of Bavaria. A visit to Rothenburg, a walled medieval town above the Tauber river, stayed with him. This picture comes out of that trip: steep roofs, figures in the street, a fairy-tale town under a bright, patchy sky, the color already laid on in small separate touches. He later said that the Rothenburg he carried in memory mattered more to him than the town itself.