Horse in a Landscape

Franz Marc had a close relationship to animals, especially horses. In meadows in the Upper Bavarian foothills near Kochel, Lenggries and Sindelsdorf, in direct contact with animals, he made numerous paintings, studies and drawings of them. He certainly did not see himself as a painter of animals in the academic tradition. Instead he was interested in a living being whose inner life he wished to depict in order to get closer to the secret of life. Animals in a landscape was, for the artist, a bridge between man and nature, whose vanished unity he wished to restore. According to him, only animals had preserved a ‘chaste majesty’. It was from this way of thinking that Marc developed an autonomy of color and form. The acutely angled body of the horse visible in the foreground and its head which is situated in the middle of the picture link with the landscape without horizon rising in the background to form a broad, intensive color scheme. The viewer experiences the gaze into the depths of a meadow landscape in the perspective of, and with the animal – perhaps Franz Marc wanted to awaken an association with Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (ca 1818).