Portrait of the Father

This is one of Franz Marc's earliest paintings, made in 1902 while he was still a student at the Munich Academy, and it is a world away from the glowing blue horses and red deer he is remembered for. It is a portrait of his father. Wilhelm Marc was himself a painter, who had worked on the decoration of King Ludwig the Second's fantastical Bavarian castles before multiple sclerosis forced him to stop working in the 1890s. Franz shows him dark and inward, painted in the sober browns the young artist had been taught to use. The bright colour and the animals were still years off. Marc was 22, and his own life would be cut short in 1916, when he was killed in the First World War.