Chevaux au pâturage II

Around 1910 Franz Marc kept returning to a single subject, horses grazing in open country, using it to work out how far he could push colour and pare a shape down. He had begun the motif two years earlier on a summer in the Bavarian foothills with Maria Franck, soon to be his wife. This is the second canvas of the group, and it survives only as a fragment, a long horizontal strip barely a foot high, the rest of the painting lost. Even in that narrow sliver you can watch him leaving ordinary brown behind and easing the horses into rounded, deliberate curves that answer the roll of the hills.