Promenade (Sketch)

In 1903 Kandinsky was still painting costume scenes from an imagined past, knights and ladies and old-world processions, and this sketch sets one of them down in a real place. The town in the background is Kallmünz, in the Upper Palatinate in Bavaria, where he spent that summer teaching an open-air painting class from his Munich school. On a stone parapet in front, a lady in a long medieval gown walks along, and a page in red follows behind her. The colour is already vivid, and the museum points to that as the one habit he kept when he later left such subjects behind for abstraction. The canvas came to Princeton in 1990 from the physicist Valentine Bargmann, who had arrived there in 1937 as Albert Einstein's assistant, and his wife Sophie, who translated many of Einstein's writings.