The blue foals

Franz Marc painted these blue foals in 1913, the last full year of peace. Within three years he was dead at Verdun, 36 years old, and the animal world he kept returning to was his way of picturing an innocence he thought people had lost. He once told his friend, the painter August Macke, that blue was the male principle, austere and spiritual, so the colour here is a mood he wanted the young horses to carry, not a description of them. The picture became the favourite work of Henri Nannen, the magazine founder who built the museum in Emden that holds it, and who happened to be born the same year it was painted. When restorers examined the canvas a century later, they found a study of a cat hidden beneath the horses.