Walters Spielsachen

These are the toys of a two-year-old. His father, August Macke, laid the boy's things out on a table and painted them: soft animals, a couple of balls, a small potted plant, and a Russian nesting doll that opens into smaller dolls inside. Macke was 25 and full of what was happening in painting around him, the flat bright colour coming out of France, from Matisse above all. You can see it in the way everything is pushed to the front and simplified, held together by clean coloured outlines. The boy was called Walter. His father would be dead within two years, killed in the autumn of 1914 in the opening weeks of the war, at 27. The picture stayed with the family for decades before it came to the museum.