Femme à la veste verte

August Macke painted this sunlit park stroll in 1913, while living beside a Swiss lake at Hilterfingen. He was one of the younger members of the Blue Rider circle, and he had just spent time with the French painter Robert Delaunay, whose way of building a picture out of luminous coloured planes you can feel here in the green jacket and the glowing foliage. Everything in it is calm, prosperous and unhurried, a well-dressed woman on an afternoon walk. Within a year that world was gone. Macke was called up when the First World War broke out and was killed in France in September 1914, at 27. He had painted for barely a decade.