Black and white horse in mountain landscape with rainbow

In 1911 Franz Marc was planning a large picture painted on the back of a pane of glass, meant to be fitted into a wooden door. This small sketchbook page is a study for it, and the door explains its odd shape, just under 22 centimetres tall and half as wide. Marc drew it in charcoal and then worked over it in watercolour and gouache. A rainbow arcs across the top, blue peaks rise in the middle, and wedges of colour step down the slope to two horses at the very bottom, one black and one white, standing close together. Marc thought enough of the finished glass picture to show it at the first exhibition of the Blue Rider, the circle he had just formed with Wassily Kandinsky, which opened at the Thannhauser gallery in Munich in December 1911. The Albertina bought this sheet in 1956 from the art dealers Gutekunst und Klipstein in Bern.