Two Horses

Franz Marc made only a small number of sculptures, about 16 in all, some of them never finished. In the summer of 1908 he spent weeks at Lenggries, in the Bavarian foothills, watching horses at pasture, studying how they stood and grouped, and modelling them in clay. This little group was made afterwards, from memory. It takes something he saw again and again in the field, two horses standing head to head and nuzzling each other, and bends that face-to-face pose into a closed ring, so the two bodies seem to circle. Writers on Marc single it out, with a panther of 1908 and two bears of 1910, as one of the three sculptures that most clarified where his painting was going. The museum dates it to 1908 or 1909. It is just over 18 centimetres high, and on the edge of the base are his initials, F. M.