Female nude with coral necklace

In February 1910 August Macke went into Munich to see an exhibition of Henri Matisse at the Galerie Thannhauser, one of the first times Matisse had been shown in Germany. He was 23. The canvas that stayed with him was a Saint-Tropez terrace of 1904, and he came away and worked harder on colour than he had before.

That year he was living in a rented house at the Tegernsee, in the mountains south of Munich, from November 1909 to November 1910, and in those twelve months he made close to 200 works. This nude with a coral necklace is one of them. It later belonged to Bernhard Sprengel, the Hannover collector who gave his modern pictures to the city in 1969, which is how the museum holding it came to exist.