Self-portrait, 1907

In 1907 Macke was 20, living in Bonn, and made his first trip to Paris, where he saw the Impressionists. He painted himself twice that year. The first go, now in Munich, is an oil on cardboard with greens, blues and pinks worked across the face. The version he settled on is this one, darker and more collected, the head coming forward out of a warm brown ground with something of a 17th-century portrait about it. It is a small thing, about 26 centimetres tall. In the autumn he left for Berlin and a few months in the studio of Lovis Corinth, then one of the best-known painters in Germany.