Siberian Shepherd Dogs

Around 1910 this canvas was sold through Brakl, a Munich art dealer, to a young couple in Aachen, the physicist Ludwig Hopf and his wife Alice. Marc had not yet painted a blue horse. Here two white sheepdogs lean forward through the snow, and the whiteness is built from strokes of pale blue, yellow and pink. The Hopfs kept the picture for almost 30 years. Ludwig Hopf lost his university post in Aachen under the Nazi racial laws, and in 1939 the family fled to London and then to Dublin, where he lectured at Trinity College and died that same year. In 1944 his widow lent the painting to an exhibition in Dublin. It was sold through a London dealer in 1958 to the New York collector Stephen Kellen, who with his wife gave it to the National Gallery of Art in 1983.