Portrait study Elisabeth Gerhardt, from memory

The title records how this picture was made. Macke painted Elisabeth Gerhardt from memory, with the sitter not in the room, and he was 20 years old.

In June 1907 he saw Paris for the first time, and that autumn he went to Berlin to study at the private school of the painter Lovis Corinth. What he produced from memory puts Elisabeth in profile against an evening river landscape. The museum in Münster, which showed the study in 2021, traces three strands in it: Botticelli, the flat decorative line of Jugendstil, and the Japanese woodblock prints Macke was collecting.

He had known her since 1903, when they were both teenagers in Bonn. The study is oil on cardboard, a little over 40 centimetres high, and it is in a private collection.