Moor huts in the Dachau moss

The painter who would later fill canvases with blue horses and red deer began like this, with a low grey moor under a heavy sky. Franz Marc was 22 in 1902, a student at the Munich Academy under teachers who drilled him in careful, sober 19th-century landscape and kept him well clear of anything new. The peat huts of the Dachau marshes, a favourite sketching ground for Munich artists, gave him a plain subject to work on. Nothing here predicts the animals and burning colour still ahead of him. It is among the earliest of his paintings that survive, made more than a decade before he was killed at Verdun in 1916.