Couple on Horseback

Kandinsky painted this around 1906, years before he became known for pure abstraction, while he was living just outside Paris with the painter Gabriele Münter. A man and a woman ride together through the dusk past a city glittering on the far bank of a river, everything built up from tiny separate dabs of colour so the whole surface shimmers like beadwork or an old fairy tale. The horse and rider was an image he kept coming back to for years, and it would later become the emblem of the group he helped found, the Blue Rider. There is no drama in it, just the couple, the trees and the lights across the water. The glowing town in the distance is usually taken to be Moscow, the city he had left behind.