Little Blue Horse by Franz Marc

Little Blue Horse is an abstract painting that was created by German artist Franz Marc in 1912

This painting has been created with oil paint on canvas and comes in the dimensions 57.5 x 73 centimetres. The painting hails from Franz Marc’s The New Painting era and at this time in his career the artist was striving to enter and portray the spirit of the horse.

This has been done in a non-western way and marked a dramatic change in the way that art was being created and thought about in Germany at that time.

The original of the Little Blue Horses painting can be viewed in the Saarland Museum, which is located in the city of Saarbrucken. Little Blue Horse shows a single profile of a horse in the centre of the canvass.

The horse is set against a mountain backdrop with the mountains being represented in bold green and yellow colours that are perfectly contrasted by the bright red mountain at the very top of the canvass that reaches up to touch the sky.

Despite the fact that there are many different natural elements in this painting, there can be no doubt that the Little Blue Horse itself is the focus of the painting.

Bold black lines have been used to outline the horse and give it definition. This also helps to represent the latent strength and spirit of the horse. As with most paintings by Franz Marc from this period, there are no human subjects in the painting and it is solely about the horse’s communion with nature.

Little Blue Horse is part of a series of blue horse paintings that were created by Franz Marc around the same period. Other paintings in this iconic series include Blue Horse I, Blue Horse II and Big Blue Horse.

Each of the paintings in this series feature bright and bold colours and dramatic brushstrokes that symbolise the relationship between man, spirituality and nature.