Portrait Maria Marc

When Franz Marc painted this in 1906, he was not yet the artist people picture, the one who filled canvases with blue horses and yellow cows. He was a young man in Munich painting the woman he loved. Maria Franck was a painter herself, and he had met her the year before at a costume ball in Schwabing, the district where the city's artists gathered. The two had just become a couple, though it would be another seven years before they married. There is none of the burning colour of his later work here. The handling is quiet and close, the palette kept to earth tones, a likeness made for the sitter rather than for any public.