Three girls in yellow straw hats I

August Macke painted this in 1913. Within a year he was dead, killed at 27 in the first autumn of the First World War, in the Champagne region of France in September 1914, one of the earliest painters lost to it. None of that has entered the picture. Three girls stand pressed together under wide yellow straw hats, in a summer world of flat, singing colour. The year before, Macke had met the Paris painter Robert Delaunay, whose canvases broke daylight into bright geometric planes, and you can see him trying the same thing here. The faces and dresses are simplified almost into stacked shapes, tied together by the rhythm of the three hats. He belonged to the Blaue Reiter, the Munich group around Kandinsky and Franz Marc, though he kept a warmth and ease they often did without. This is the first of two versions he painted of the subject.