Femme lisant en vert

In the spring of 1906 Franz Marc sailed to Mount Athos, the peninsula of Orthodox monasteries in northern Greece, with his elder brother Paul, a scholar of Byzantium. He was back in Bavaria for the summer and went up to Kochel am See in the foothills below the Alps, where he painted a run of small studies of women sitting out on the mountain pasture. This is one of them, oil on a piece of painting board about 27 by 30 centimetres. The woman reading is Maria Franck, a painter he had met in Munich the year before and married in 1913. The board stayed with the family for nearly 80 years, until it was acquired from the Marc estate in 1985 for the museum at Kochel, the village where he painted it.