Promenade

August Macke painted this in the autumn of 1913, just after he moved with his wife and small son to the shore of Lake Thun in Switzerland. The eight months there were the best working stretch of his life. Well-dressed strollers pause in a park by the water, a couple sitting close and quiet, everything held in soft, glowing colour. It looks like leisure with all the time in the world. There was not much time at all. Macke belonged to the Blue Rider circle in Munich, the loose group around Kandinsky pushing German painting toward pure colour. Within a year the war came. Macke was called up and killed in France in September 1914, 27 years old, only weeks into the fighting.