Kallmünz – Nature Study for The Yellow Stagecoach

In the summer of 1903 Kallmünz, a small market town where the river Vils flows into the Naab in the Upper Palatinate, had no railway. A line up the valley had been blocked, the local story goes, by farmers afraid that soot from the engines would harm their animals. The nearest station was about eight kilometres away at Burglengenfeld, and most visitors arrived by the post coach that ran to the town regularly. That summer Kandinsky brought the painting class of his Munich school here to work outdoors. He himself came by train to Regensburg and rode the rest of the way by bicycle. This little board, about 33 centimetres wide, is one of the studies he made in front of the landscape, hills and fields in summer. On the back Münter wrote Kandinsky, Kallmünz, 1903. Johannes Eichner, her companion in later life, added the title, nature study for the yellow post coach, meaning a study made for a picture of that coach.