Grazing Horses III

In the spring of 1910 Franz Marc, then 30, left Munich for Sindelsdorf, a village in the Bavarian foothills, and settled among fields and animals. Horses became his central subject around this time, and he painted them in a numbered run of grazing scenes, of which this is the third. For Marc the horse stood for a natural harmony he felt city life had lost, so he watched how the animals folded into the curve of a meadow instead of posing them. The heightened, simplified colour here points to the direction he was taking just before he and Wassily Kandinsky founded the Blue Rider group in 1911. Marc volunteered when the war came and was killed near Verdun in 1916, at 36.