Self Portrait

Macke was 19 when he painted this, a student at the Düsseldorf academy, though in 1906 a good deal of his working time went elsewhere. The Schauspielhaus had opened in the city the previous October, run by the actress Louise Dumont and her husband Gustav Lindemann, and the writer Wilhelm Schmidtbonn brought the student along and introduced him. Through that year Macke designed sets and costumes for a run of their productions. He was also out of the country for part of it, travelling in the Netherlands, Belgium and Britain. The canvas is a small one, about 54 centimetres tall. The museum in Münster that owns it also keeps his archive and some 80 of his sketchbooks.