Self-Portrait with Hat

In 1909 Macke was 22 and working in Bonn, the city he had grown up in. He painted himself on a wood panel barely 41 centimetres high, in a hat and a dark jacket with a red tie.

Bonn had no public collection of modern art at the time. One began in 1949, when the city bought two of his paintings, and the museum that grew out of that purchase now holds work from every phase of his career, one of the largest such groups anywhere. The curator who looks after the Rhineland painters there calls this the most important of Macke's self-portraits.