Horse sketch II

In 1906 Franz Marc was 26 and still painting the world much as he saw it. He had trained at the Munich Academy, and that year he travelled to Greece with his brother Paul, a scholar of the Byzantine world, working the whole time through small studies from life. This is one of them, an oil sketch of a horse barely larger than a sheet of paper. The horse would become the creature of his life, the one he came back to again and again, and about five years later he started painting them a deep, unnatural blue. In 1906 that was still years off. Marc had ten years left. He was killed at Verdun in 1916, and this small study stayed behind in Munich.