Mädchen mit Fischglas

August Macke painted this quiet interior in 1914, a young woman leaning over a glass bowl of fish, the colour laid down in the bright, cheerful blocks he loved. Within months he was dead. Macke was called up when the First World War began that August and killed in Champagne on 26 September, aged 27, in the war's second month. He was among the very first German painters lost, and his friend Franz Marc mourned him as one of the most beautiful colourists their art had. Works like this belong to the last stretch of his short life, when he was moving toward a lighter, almost weightless handling of light. The fish turning in their bowl are the kind of small, unhurried pleasure he kept painting to the end.