The four companion dogs of Prince Jusuff

This is a postcard, 14 by nine centimetres, painted in watercolour and gouache over pencil. Franz Marc sent cards like it to the Berlin poet Else Lasker-Schüler, who signed her letters as Prince Jussuf of Thebes, and he filled them with animals for her imaginary kingdom. Here four hounds in red, ochre, blue and grey crowd together, and the handwritten line in the top corner names them as the prince's companions. In 1939, while the regime was selling off the modern art it had seized from German museums as degenerate, the painter Emanuel Fohn and his wife Sofie traded older pictures from their own collection for such works, and 28 of Marc's cards to Lasker-Schüler were among what they obtained. In 1964 the Fohns gave more than 200 works to the Bavarian state collections in Munich, and this card was one of them.