Couple at the Garden Table

In his last two years Macke painted little except ordinary afternoons out of doors. People walking, people looking into shop windows, people sitting under trees. He named the pictures the same way, by what is going on rather than by who is there, so this one from 1914 is simply a couple at a garden table. Faces in these paintings are hardly painted at all. A figure is carried by a hat, a posture, the colour of a coat, and by the flat planes of colour he had been building his pictures from since about 1912.