Woman in Winter Landscape on a Green Seat

This is Franz Marc about five years before the blue horses that made his name. In 1906 he was 26, working small and quiet in muted browns and greys, and this panel is barely 24 centimetres across. He painted it at Kochel am See, in the Bavarian foothills, and signed it in a corner "Kochel III 06." A woman sits on a green bench in the snow, and that is nearly the whole event. There is no glowing colour theory yet and no Blue Rider group. That circle around Kandinsky was still to come, and would gather in this same country of lakes and mountains. Marc had known Kochel since childhood summers there. The little board now hangs in the museum in that town, on loan from the Munich state collections.