Water pond

By 1906 the name Franz Marc did not yet mean glowing blue horses and red deer. That language was still about five years off. This pond, painted when he was 26, belongs to an earlier and quieter Marc, still working close to what stood in front of him: dark water, reeds, the muffled green of a Bavarian summer near Kochel, the lake country south of Munich he kept coming back to. The paint stays in earth tones and shadow, nothing like the saturated colour he would later use to lift animals toward something spiritual. He had trained at the Munich academy and was still absorbing more than he was inventing. Within ten years he would be dead at Verdun, killed in 1916 at 36. None of that shows here, only a shaded corner of standing water, looked at plainly.