Sheep by Franz Marc

Looking at Sheep

Franz Marc’s Schafe (Sheep) shows two animals lowering their heads in a landscape built from broad bands of red, purple, blue and green. The painting dates from 1912 and belongs to the Saarlandmuseum in Saarbrücken. The museum-linked Bildindex record gives its medium as oil on canvas and describes the sheep merging chromatically with the surrounding landscape, held apart by dark outlines. This is the work reproduced on the existing “Sheep” page, rather than another similarly titled image of Marc’s sheep. ^{[1] [2]}

Watch: Franz Marc

Explore Marc’s blue horses, the Blue Rider circle and the move towards abstraction in English-language videos.

Franz Marc, Blue Horses and Der Blaue Reiter

The Canvas

An English-language introduction to Marc’s blue horses, animals, spirituality and the Blue Rider.

Watch on YouTube

▶01 · Marc and his horsesFranz Marc, Blue Horses and Der Blaue ReiterThe Canvas▶02 · The Blue RiderWho were the Blue Rider?Tate▶03 · Towards abstractionThe Case for AbstractionThe Art Assignment · PBS Digital Studios

Two sheep, one field of colour

The left sheep curves almost into a circle. Its back is orange and green, and the lowered pale head sits near the middle of the canvas. The second sheep, further right, bends down in a different direction; its green body is partly lost against the green around it. Heavy black lines mark the backs and necks, yet those lines do not give the animals a separate stage. Colour moves across sheep and ground alike. ^{[1] [2]}

The pink and violet bands beneath the animals are as active as the figures themselves. Above them, a long warm red strip runs across the upper picture, with dark blue beyond. The composition is shallow: it offers no distant horizon or naturalistic pasture for the viewer to enter. Instead, Marc makes the two sheep and their surroundings into one dense pattern. Compare Little Blue Horse, also held by the Saarlandmuseum, where a single animal stands against a more open sequence of coloured hills. ^[1]

The work and its reproductions

The painting has also been called Zwei Schafe (Two Sheep) in historical records. Bildindex records a 1949 exhibition label using that title, while its current object heading is Schafe. The work is an oil painting, not a print. The reproduction used here comes from a public-domain art-book file; the separate Bildindex museum photograph carries its own restrictive licence and is used only for object research. ^{[1] [2]}