Large Horse Picture Lenggries I

In the summer of 1908 Franz Marc and the painter Maria Franck, who later became his wife, stayed at Lenggries, a village on the river Isar in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. She remembered that he went after the horses there constantly, watching them and learning them by heart, as he put it, and then went back to his easel. This picture is what that summer produced. It is roughly one metre high and two wide, and four horses crowd into it at close to life size, pressed together, their bodies cut off by the edges. He still painted them in their natural colours. It opened a run of large pictures of grazing horses that Marc kept up for three years, ending in 1911 with the fourth version, known as The Red Horses.