Lettre autographe signée adressée à sa mère Sophie Maurice

19 August 1915, 22,2x28,6cm, 2 pages on a leaf.
Autograph letter in German signed by the painter Franz Marc to his mother Sophie Marc (née Maurice); two pages in black ink. Trace of horizontal and vertical fold.

Unpublished letter. Not in the latest edition of his wartime correspondence (Briefe aus dem Feld, Norderstedt, 2019).

Lengthy unpublished letter from Franz Marc to his mother during the First World War, written a few months before his death in Verdun. In the horror of the conflict, the future martyr of German expressionism recalls childhood images and tells horse stories from the front.
Stationed on the Alsace front, the famed animal painter recounts a hilarious wild boar hunt improvised during a horseback ride, reminding him of an illustrated childhood tale: The Three Jovial Hunstmen by Randolph Caldecott (1880). Franz Marc reveals here an inspiration for his famous horses, which gave their name to the “Blaue Reiter” movement created in 1911 with Wassily Kandinsky. The horses in Caldecott's Huntsmen resemble Franz Marc's paintings from 1905-1910. This anecdote is also related to “hunting horses” sketched on the front, and a postcard sketch of the same “Jagende Pferde” sent to the poet Else Laske-Schüler in September 1915.

The letter gives a glimpse of Franz Marc's daily life on the front. By a cruel irony of fate, he fought in the native region of his mother Sophie Marc née Maurice, born in 1847 in the Alsatian village of Guebwiller. When war broke out in August 1914, he joined the army hoping for a renewal of Europe like many fellow artists and intellectuals. Due to the circumstances of the war, the painter wrote his letter in German and not in French, as he was accustomed to do in his correspondence with his mother. His mother's influence was decisive in his aesthetic and spiritual approach: Marc's tireless quest for “purity” inherited from his Calvinist upbringing eventually led him to abstraction, already present in his sketches as he wrote this letter.
He gives news of a future promotion, thanks his mother for sending him food and fills the page with the story of his miraculous hunt: “I have one more amusing story to tell: as I was riding out at dawn (before breakfast), I suddenly noticed a young boar (a wild boar) beside me in a ditch. I immediately called my fellow riders; he was surrounded – I already felt sorry for the poor animal, but the pity came too late! – Two of them jumped in, one grabbed him by the ears, the other poked him and the roast for the steward's table was retrieved. A most comical scene ensued: We ordered the youngest [soldier] to go home with the boar and got him on horseback; but no sooner did the horse feel the boar on his back (horses are very afraid of boars) than he reared up and threw the rider and the pig into a great arc. Fortunately, nothing happened and the embarrassed rider had to walk the boar back, then the horse really reared up as soon as he was approached. A real amateur rider! I was thinking of Dad's old English picture book: the jovial huntsman!”

With this light-hearted anecdote, the painter reveals a source of inspiration still unknown to critics and historians. The Three Jovial Huntsmen certainly influenced the young Franz Marc, whose own horses painted in the 1910s (including the Weidende Pferde I, Lenbachhaus, Munich) are unmistakably marked by Caldecott's British style. In the following years, he added to this subject his kaleidoscopic touch and his emblematic blue, red and yellow colors charged with spiritual symbolism. Franz Marc also painted blue wild boars in 1913 (Museum Ludwig, Cologne). The story of this hunt is also completely new, since he asked his mother to tell it to his wife Maria to avoid writing a second letter “it's long: to tell the same thing twice”.
This anecdote about hunting and rearing horses can be directly linked to a sketch on a postcard dated the following month, entitled “jagende Pferde”, showing the importance of this moment of respite from the atrocity of the war. His famous horses become almost cubist under the hard lines of graphite, as Franz Marc abandons figuration and ventures towards the abstract. The “hunting horses” reappear under the same title in his Skizzenbuch aus dem Felde (Sketchbook from the Front), which contains the painter's last drawings before his death on March 4, 1916 in Verdun, at the age of 36.

The “Blaue Reiter” donned the Feldgrau uniform of the German cavalry before succumbing to the deadly reality of a world war that tore Europe apart. This unpublished letter is certainly one of the last happy memories of the painter, surrounded by the horses that he sketched until the very end.