Tunisian Harbour

On 6 April 1914 Macke sailed from Marseille on the steamer Carthage with two painter friends, Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet, and they came into Tunis the next morning. The journey lasted about two weeks. Macke worked fast, making 33 watercolours and filling three sketchbooks with 79 drawings, and he painted this oil only once he was home in Bonn. What he kept was mostly colour and shape. The sea is a single band of hard blue at the back, the clothes and the goods stacked on the quay in front of it are warm and earthy, and every form is pushed towards a simple geometric block. In Münster the picture carries a second title, Harbour in Tunis.