Due donne sul pendio

This small oil, no bigger than a sheet of paper, comes from the summer of 1906, when Franz Marc was still painting in soft, Impressionist colour — years before the blue horses and red deer he is remembered for. He spent that summer at Kochel, in the Bavarian foothills, and set two women out on an alpine pasture. He had met the painters Marie Schnür and Maria Franck the year before, and would go on to marry each of them in turn. What survives here is the quick outdoor study; from it he built a larger canvas later. Marc was 26 when he made it. Ten years on he was dead at Verdun, one of a generation of German artists lost in the war.