Horses in the meadow

Horses in the Meadow (1910), executed on paper and now in the Liège Fine Arts Museum in Belgium, represents Franz Marc working on a smaller scale and a different support as he developed his mature animal imagery. The 1910 date is significant: it falls in the year before the founding of Der Blaue Reiter and the consolidation of Marc's most celebrated artistic identity, placing this work in a crucial transitional moment. His horse subjects were becoming increasingly important as symbolic vehicles, and this meadow scene shows him exploring the compositional and colour possibilities of equine subjects before arriving at the full prismatic-plane treatment of 1911. The work's presence in Belgium reflects the international circulation of German Expressionist art through the early twentieth-century gallery network and subsequent collecting patterns.

The paper support gives a different quality compared with Marc's oil canvases — the medium allows for looser handling and a certain transparency of colour. The composition is relatively open, with horses distributed across a meadow ground in a manner that already suggests the symbolic unity of