Milliner's Shop

In the autumn of 1913 Macke moved his family to Hilterfingen, a village on Lake Thun in Switzerland, and had the most productive year of his short life. This is one of a run of shop-window paintings he made there. A woman in a deep blue dress stands with her back to us, looking at hats set out on golden stands behind the glass. He had lately seen the window paintings of Robert Delaunay in Paris and loved how colour could take on depth in a sheet of reflecting glass. You can feel that here in the saturated, almost motionless light. Less than a year after he painted it, in September 1914, Macke was killed in the first weeks of the war in Champagne. He was 27. The collector Bernhard Koehler owned this canvas, and in 1965 it came to the Lenbachhaus in Munich.