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Kandinsky had been living in Germany for 18 years when the war started in 1914 and he had to leave. He went back to Moscow, and for the next few years he painted very little that was abstract at all. In 1916 he wrote to Gabriele Münter, the painter he had lived with in Munich, that he was making a series of studies of the view from his window.

This is one of them. Zubovskaya Square sits on the ring of boulevards that circles central Moscow, and it was simply what he could see. He painted it as a straightforward city view, the kind of picture he had left behind years before, and on a small board barely wider than a sheet of paper. He left Russia for good at the end of 1921. The Moscow studies stayed behind, and this one is in the Tretyakov Gallery.