Tunisian Landscape

In April 1914 August Macke spent about two weeks in Tunisia with two painter friends, Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet. The North African light did something to his colour, breaking the towns and hills into bright, simplified planes, and he came home with dozens of watercolours and a few oils like this one. What none of them knew was how little time was left. That August the First World War began, Macke was called up, and by late September 1914 he was dead at the front in Champagne, 27 years old. He had painted this Tunisian scene only months earlier, among the last groups of work he ever finished.