Monaco di Baviera, il cimitero del Nord

In 1903 Kandinsky was 37 and still painting places you could find on a map. He had given up a legal career in Moscow seven years earlier to study art in Munich, and by now he was running his own school there, the Phalanx, where one of the students was Gabriele Münter. Those summers went on small oil sketches made outdoors, the paint laid on in short separate strokes with a knife. This one is the northern cemetery in Schwabing, opened in 1884 for a district that was filling up faster than anyone had planned for. The support is a piece of cardboard about 32 centimetres tall. It stayed with the painter's widow, Nina Kandinsky, and came into the national collection in Paris with her bequest in 1981.