Terrace of the Country House in St. Germain

St. Germain sounds like the town outside Paris. This one was a seaside village south of Tunis, in what was then the French protectorate of Tunisia, and it is called Ezzahra today. Macke spent about two weeks in the country in April 1914 with Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet, and the house behind this terrace belonged to a Swiss doctor named Jäggi, a friend of Moilliet's who took the three of them in. They came out on Good Friday. Klee wrote in his diary the next day that he was painting small compositions into the corners of the dining room, and Macke was decorating the walls as well.

To travel light, Macke had packed only watercolour and drawing materials, so everything he made in Tunisia is on paper. This sheet is watercolour over a pencil drawing, 22 by 29 centimetres. The oils came afterwards, back in Bonn, worked up from sheets like this one.