Children with a Goat

In October 1913 Macke took his family from Bonn to Hilterfingen on Lake Thun in Switzerland, and this small picture was painted at the very start of the stay, in what his wife Elisabeth later remembered as summery, warm, radiant autumn weeks. In her memoir she also set down what occupied him then. Even in an even area of green, she wrote, there must be no dead spot, the colour has to work, vibrate, live. His whole effort went into tuning pure colours so that, for all the contrasts, a great harmony held the picture together. The foliage here is where to test it. The green is fanned out into many saturated shades that keep the eye moving between them, and the children with their goat sit in a pale, almost white patch of light enclosed by it. The board measures 24 by 34 centimetres and is signed at the lower right, Aug. Macke 1913.