Leaping dog

In 1908 Franz Marc was 28, a Munich painter still finding his way, three years before the blue horses and yellow cows that made his name. There is none of that colour here. A dog called Schlick leaps across the board in browns and greys, its body stretched flat in mid-jump, close to the way a dog really looks. What is already settled is the subject. Marc had chosen to paint animals rather than people, convinced they met the world more honestly than we do, and he kept to that almost to the end. He was killed at Verdun in 1916, at the age of 36.