Landscape with Cows and Camel

In the spring of 1914 Macke spent about two weeks in Tunisia with two painter friends, and the light there rearranged how he worked; the watercolours he carried home are soaked in it. This oil belongs to the same run of North African subjects, a camel set among cattle with palms behind, the whole scene broken into soft plates of colour he had picked up from Delaunay in Paris. He was 27 and working fast. That August the war began and Macke was called up almost at once. He was killed in Champagne at the end of September, six months after the trip that put the camel and the palm trees into his head.