Horses by the sea

In March 1907 Franz Marc, then 27, travelled to Paris, and the paintings by Van Gogh and Gauguin he saw there made a deep impression on him. This small study comes from that same year. It measures about 20 by 25 centimetres, oil on canvas mounted on cardboard, and shows two brown horses on the shore. Horses would become Marc's great subject, but the famous blue ones, painted in colours no real horse has, were still four years away. Marc was killed at Verdun in 1916, and for decades afterwards his work was looked after by his widow, the painter Maria Marc. In 1955 she gave this study to the Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich, where it is catalogued under its German title, Pferde am Meer.