Walk on the Bridge

Macke kept coming back to people strolling across a bridge. The large version of the subject, a canvas about a metre wide, hangs in the Hessian State Museum in Darmstadt, and sources disagree over whether he painted it in 1912 or 1913. This small piece of cardboard, about 25 by 30 centimetres, is dated 1913, and the museum lists a bridge, trees, hats, an umbrella and strollers among what it shows. The motif went with him when he moved to Lake Thun in Switzerland that autumn, and an ink drawing of 1914 puts walkers at a lakeside balustrade there. Bernhard Koehler, the Berlin collector who was his wife's uncle, bought this picture from Macke himself, and it stayed in the Koehler family until it came to the Lenbachhaus as a gift in 1965.