Garden Gate

In April 1914 August Macke spent about two weeks in Tunisia with his friends the painters Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet. This small sheet comes from those days, painted around the tenth of the month at a doctor's country house in Saint-Germain, just outside Tunis. It shows a garden gate and the wall beside it, laid down in thin washes of watercolour over a light pencil drawing, the colour dropped onto the paper in flat patches with almost no shadow. What the trip gave him was that southern light, and you can watch him working out how to hold it with colour alone. He was 27. Five months later the war began, and Macke was killed at the front in Champagne that September, having painted for barely a decade.