Mode: Woman with Parasol in front of Milliner's Shop

Macke spent the summer of 1914 with his family beside Lake Thun in Switzerland, and that summer he kept painting shop windows, hat shops especially, their glass full of reflections and colour. Here a well-dressed woman with a parasol pauses in front of one, the millinery display glowing beside her like a small stained-glass panel. The play of coloured light came from his friend Robert Delaunay, whose paintings of light in windows he admired. It is a scene of easy, ordinary pleasure. Within weeks the war had begun and Macke had gone to the front. He was killed in Champagne on 26 September 1914, at 27, and this bright shop window is among the very last pictures he made.