Porträt mit Äpfeln: Frau des Künstlers

Macke married Elisabeth Gerhardt in the autumn of 1909, and the couple spent their honeymoon in Paris, where he saw the hot, loose colour of Matisse and the Fauves for the first time. Back in Germany that October, settled by the Tegernsee lake, he painted his young wife. She is expecting their first child, turned toward him but with her eyes lowered to something outside the frame, holding a bowl with three apples in yellow, red and green. The bright, flat colour is Paris still fresh in his hands. Macke was 22 and at the start of everything, and he would be killed in the first weeks of the war five years later.