Waterbirds

From 1911 until his death Paul Klee kept a handwritten catalogue of everything he made, entering each work under its year with its own number, and he usually mounted his sheets on card and wrote the title and date beneath them in his own hand. Waterbirds, Wasservögel in his German, is one of those entries for 1939. He drew it in Bern, the Swiss city where he had grown up and where he lived out his last years, in graphite pencil with watercolour over it. The sheet is small, about 27 by 21 centimetres. The Museum of Fine Arts acquired it in 1956.