Riding Couple

Kandinsky painted this during a stay in Sèvres, near Paris, in the winter of 1906–07 — a period of intensive experimentation before his breakthrough into abstraction. Born in Moscow, he had abandoned a promising legal career at 30 to study painting in Munich, where he settled in 1896 and eventually co-founded the Blue Rider group in 1911. The painting was owned by his partner and student Gabriele Münter from at least 1926 until her death. In 1957, aged 79, Münter donated it along with over 80 Kandinsky oil paintings and hundreds of drawings and prints to the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich — one of the most significant gifts in German museum history, and the reason the Lenbachhaus holds the largest Kandinsky collection in the world.