The dead sparrow

Franz Marc is remembered for his blue horses and dreaming deer, and for dying young at Verdun in 1916. This comes from well before any of that, painted in 1905 when he was 25 and still finding his way. It is tiny, no bigger than a hand, a dead sparrow lying on its back on a small wooden panel, signed and dated in one corner. Animals would become the whole centre of his art, the creatures he believed saw the world more purely than people did. Here, near the very beginning, he is already studying one of them closely.