Klee executed Kinder und Hund in 1920, a time of relative prosperity for the artist, and one that marked a turning point in his career. In 1919 he secured a three-year contract with the dealer Hans Goltz, whose influential Munich gallery promoted Klee’s art, including a large retrospective exhibition of some 370 works held in 1920. It was later that year that Klee was invited by the architect Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus, and subsequently moved to Weimar in 1921, when his work would become increasingly abstract and geometricised. Human figures and animals feature prominently in Klee’s works of this period. The humorous note and child-like style of the present work and many others from this time were probably a reaction to the harsh reality of the aftermath of the World War I.

The first owner of Kinder und Hund was Galka E. Scheyer, a collector and dealer whose primary interest was in ‘The Blue Four’: Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Klee and Feininger. In 1924 she moved from Germany to New York, and later settled in California. In America, particularly California, she befriended a number of collectors and museum curators, and energetically promoted the four artists, organising group and solo exhibitions and giving lectures on their work. Kinder und Hund was included in several exhibitions organised by Scheyer and held in various American museums and galleries in the early 1930s. It was mainly through her activities, as well as those of the dealer Curt Valentin, that works by Klee were introduced to American collections. In 1931 Kinder und Hund was acquired by the Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957), and remained in his family until it was sold at auction in New York in 1969, when it was purchased by the present owners.