‘You saw in Kallmünz how I paint. So I do everything that I must: it is ready within me and it must find expression.’ (W. Kandinsky, letter to G. Münter, Aug 10 1904, quoted in Kandinsky in Munich: 1896-1914, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1982, p. 83)

In June 1903, Wassily Kandinsky set out on a painting trip to the small picturesque village of Kallmünz in north-eastern Bavaria, accompanied by a group of his Phalanx students. Spending their days working en-plein air, Kandinsky produced a number of small-format oil studies of Kallmünz and its environs, focusing his eye on views of the medieval castle, open fields, rolling hills and, as seen in Kallmünz – Regentag, the colourful old houses that populated its winding streets.

Created using thick, visceral strokes of pigment, these compositions reveal the important relationship between Kandinsky's work of this period and the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, which he had greatly admired at the 1903 Munich Secession. This influence is particularly notable in Kandinsky's remarkable use of the palette knife in the present composition, which allowed him to achieve a greater freedom in his handling of paint, building the scene through heavily impastoed layers and coarse strokes of pigment. There is also a new sense of immediacy and simplicity in Kandinsky’s approach to colour at this time, with non-naturalistic tones and pastel hues making their way into his palette, their presence hinting towards the bold approach to form and colour that would characterise his later abstractions.

Initially held in the collection of Gabriele Münter, Munich, the artist's significant partner in art and life during his early career, from whom passing through the hands of Otto Stangl, Munich and then to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York and quickly retrieved by Galerie Beyeler, Basel in 1964, the distinguished early provenance of the present work reinforces its quality as a true highlight from this period.