Horsemen of the Apocalypse I

The four horsemen in the Book of Revelation are told apart by what they carry. The first, on a white horse, has a bow, and the second, on a red horse, is given a great sword. The Lenbachhaus catalogue finds those same signs on this small pane of 1911: a sword, a bow and arrow, riders. Every glass picture has to be painted back to front. As in his other glass pictures, Kandinsky put the black ink contours on the glass first, then the colours inside them and the background last, with metal leaf worked in among the paint. He came back to the subject three years later. Horsemen of the Apocalypse II, dated July 1914 and also in the Lenbachhaus, was the last glass picture he painted in Murnau.