Sketchbook Nr. 27 A S. 22 verso Round dance at the fountain

In 1907 August Macke was 20 and had just made his first trip to Paris, where the Impressionists showed him what loose colour and open daylight could do. This is a page from one of his sketchbooks, a quick watercolour of figures joining hands in a round dance beside a fountain. Nothing here was meant for a wall. It's a working note, the kind of thing a young painter sets down to catch a movement before it slips away. Macke filled dozens of such books in a short life. He was killed in the war in 1914, at 27, and this sheet is one leaf among the sketchbooks that came to Münster, where much of his working material is kept.