Garden Restaurant

August Macke painted this in 1912, when he was in his mid-twenties and full of the new colour coming out of Paris and Munich. He had seen Manet on his trips to France and loved his scenes of city people at their ease, and here he does his own: guests in a garden restaurant on a summer afternoon, a man reading his newspaper, women in bright dresses catching the light, a waiter standing by, a brown dog dozing in front. Almost all his art is like this, ordinary modern pleasure set down in clear, warm colour. He belonged to the Blaue Reiter circle of painters then forming around Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Two years after this, in September 1914, Macke was killed in the opening weeks of the First World War. He was 27.