Parc of Saint-Cloud, Shaded Path

If you know Kandinsky for pure colour and floating shapes, this quiet park path comes as a surprise. He painted it in 1906, while living just outside Paris at Sevres and walking often in the park at Saint-Cloud, which reminded him of the English Garden back in Munich. He was 40, and still years from the abstract pictures that would make his name. Here he works straight from what is in front of him, laying paint in short thick dabs that follow the light and shade down an avenue of trees. The bright broken colour owes something to the French painters he was studying then, Paul Signac and the Fauves among them. His companion the painter Gabriele Munter set up at the same spot and painted the same path, in gentler tones than his.