Cathedral at Freiburg, Switzerland

Macke made this in 1914, and it was nearly the last thing he painted. He was 27, one of the youngest of the Blue Rider group, and that spring he travelled first through Switzerland, where he took on the Gothic cathedral of the town of Fribourg, and then to Tunisia with two friends, where the light pushed his colour further than ever. He treats the old church as a frame for colour: the tower and the roofs break into flat panes of rose, green and blue, held together by the drawing rather than by any single source of light. In August the war began, Macke was called up, and he was killed at the front in Champagne at the end of that September, a few months after finishing this.