Sand Pit on the Schleissheimer Allee

The title names the avenue that ran north from Munich to Schleissheim, the palace of the Bavarian electors, who once drove along this road in their carriages between Schleissheim and the Residenz in town. Eduard Schleich painted a sand pit beside it, at a date the museum gives only as between about 1860 and 1870, when the old court road led out of the city into flat, open country. The museum's catalogue tags the picture with people at work, a horse, trees and sky. Around 1860, according to the art historian Siegfried Wichmann, Schleich began to combine thin glazes with paint laid on with a palette knife, following the movement he saw in the landscape. He signed this canvas Ed Schleich at the lower right, and the Lenbachhaus bought it in 1939.