Portrait Ottilie Macke in a white blouse

August Macke painted this in 1907, when he was 20 and had not yet been to Paris. The woman in the white blouse is Ottilie Gerhardt, whom he had been courting for a few years and would marry in 1909. The handling is still quiet and tonal, close to the German studio painting he had trained in. That same year he made his first trip to Paris and saw the Impressionists, and soon after studied briefly in Berlin under the painter Lovis Corinth. Within a few years his canvases would fill with the bright, blocked color of the Blaue Reiter circle he helped lead. He kept painting Ottilie more often than any other model, in sketches and finished portraits alike. He was killed in September 1914, in the second month of the First World War, at the age of 27.