Indersdorf

Nothing here hints at the blue horses Franz Marc would be famous for a few years on. In 1904 he was 24 and still looking for a way to paint. The year before, a trip to France had shown him the Impressionists for the first time, and he came back, quit his classes at the Munich Academy, and went out to the village of Indersdorf north of Dachau to work in the open air with a brighter palette. The scene he chose is deliberately plain. An inn, the Gasthaus zur Mühle, sits above the little river Glonn, with a bridge to one side and long flower beds running down to the water, and between the beds and the road he has hung a line of coloured washing out to dry.