The Bewitched Mill

The Bewitched Mill was painted after Marc visited the town of Merano in the Italian South Tirol, where he felt a sense of enchanted harmony between human settlement and the natural world — the 'bewitchment' of the title. It was purchased in 1914 by Arthur Jerome Eddy, a Chicago lawyer who had attended the landmark 1913 Armory Show and bought 25 of its most radical works in a single visit, becoming one of the first Americans to collect Kandinsky, Klee, and the European avant-garde. After Eddy's death in 1920, his widow and son donated his collection to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1931 as the Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection, making this one of the AIC's founding works of German Expressionism. Marc was killed at the Battle of Verdun in 1916, aged 36, making his 1913 paintings among the last he completed before the war interrupted and ended his career.