Wassily Kandinsky is forced to choose among…

Wassily Kandinsky is forced to choose among his possible futures, for he is offered a professorship in jurisprudence at the University of Dorpat (later called Tartu), in Estonia, which is undergoing Russification.

Approaching his thirtieth birthday in 1896, he turns down the offer (in what he will later call a "now or never" mood,) and takes the train for Germany with the intention of becoming a painter.

He already has an air of authority (that will contribute to his success as a teacher in later years).

Tall, large-framed, impeccably dressed, and equipped with pince-nez glasses, he has a habit of holding his head high and seeming to look down at the universe.

According to acquaintances, he resembles a mixture of diplomat, scientist, and Mongol prince.

But for the moment he is simply an average art student, and he enrolls as such in a private school at Munich run by Anton Azbé.

Here Kandinsky meets thirty-two-year-old Alexey von Jawlensky, who had given up an established career in the Russian Imperial Guard to study painting under the Russian historical painter Ilya Repin and in 1896, disenchanted with realism, had moved to Munich.