The Little Mountain Goats

Franz Marc painted these two green goats at Kochel am See, in the Bavarian foothills of the Alps, on the eve of the First World War. They float above a row of spiky peaks, broken into prism-like planes of transparent colour. Marc was killed near Verdun in 1916, and his widow Maria kept the canvas until the mid-1920s, when it passed to Georg Hess, a Jewish businessman in Berlin. In 1938 Hess left Germany for Amsterdam, and his daughter Lilo emigrated to New York. The museum's research suggests the painting travelled with her, since it is missing from the list of lost property she filed after the war. By 1939 it was on show at a New York gallery run by the dealer Curt Valentin. Her parents were killed at Sobibor in 1943. The picture came to St. Louis in 1983, in the bequest of the department-store heir Morton D. May.