Bildnis der Mutter

This is early Franz Marc, painted in 1902 when he was 22 and only two years into art school in Munich. Nothing here hints at the painter he would become, the man who, within ten years, would fill canvases with blue horses and red deer and help start the Blue Rider group. His mother sits in profile, quietly reading, in muted browns and greys, the mood grave and tender. Marc had thought about training for the priesthood before he turned to painting, and a quiet, searching seriousness runs through even this student work. He was killed in the First World War, at Verdun in 1916, still in his mid-thirties.