Romantic Landscape

Three riders come down the slope from right to left, hard to pick out at first because horses and hillside are made of the same loose colour. A small blood-red sun sits above them. Kandinsky painted this in Munich in 1911, at the point where his landscapes were coming apart and recognisable things were about to drop out of his work altogether.

He did not file it under either of the headings he was using then, Impression or Improvisation, and left it standing on its own. Almost 20 years later he was still explaining the title in a letter, insisting that the romanticism he meant had nothing to do with the old kind, and describing it as a piece of ice with a flame burning inside it.

The canvas stayed with Gabriele Münter, the painter he had lived and worked with in Bavaria, and in 1957 she handed the Kandinskys in her keeping to the city of Munich.