Girls under Trees

Macke made this in 1914, and it was the biggest canvas he ever attempted. He began it before the trip that spring to Tunisia with his friend Paul Klee, the journey usually credited with flooding his work with light, yet the merging of the girls into the greens and blues around the lake was already there before he left. He was close to the painter Robert Delaunay in Paris, whose ideas about colours vibrating side by side run all through this. By the end of that same year Macke was dead, killed at the front in France that September. He was 27, and this large, unhurried summer scene was among the last things he finished.