The Artist's Wife with Hat

Elisabeth Gerhardt was 21 when she sat for this, and she had been married to the painter for a matter of weeks. They wed in Bonn on 5 October 1909, spent the honeymoon in Paris, where Macke looked hard at Matisse and the other Fauves, and by the end of the month were living at the Tegernsee in Bavaria. He painted her there in a small green hat with a blue band and a white feather, an amber necklace, a violet jacket.

The marriage settled the money as well. Her father manufactured pharmaceutical equipment, and her uncle Bernhard Koehler, a Berlin manufacturer and collector, paid Macke an allowance that meant he never had to take a job. Macke began the portrait as a knee-length figure and cropped it down to head and shoulders.

Elisabeth outlived him by 64 years and wrote a book about their life together. The painting stayed in the family the whole time. The museum in Münster had it on loan for 33 years before buying it in 2014.