Caballo azul

Franz Marc believed colours carried meanings, and blue for him was the spiritual, masculine colour, which is why so many of his animals are blue. He painted this small one in 1912, at the height of his years with the Blue Rider circle in Munich, while staying with his friend the painter August Macke in Bonn. It was a gift for Macke's little son Walther, then two years old, and Marc wrote the dedication right onto it. Underneath the surface, x-rays have found an earlier picture of two deer in a landscape that Marc painted over, probably to spare the cost of a fresh canvas. The young horse stands calm in a field of pure colour. Four years later Marc was dead, killed at Verdun in 1916.