Femme soutenant une coupe de fleurs

August Macke painted this in 1910, when he was 23 and living in the Rhineland. He had already made trips to Paris and come home fixed on the bright, flat colour of Matisse and the newest French painting, and he spent these years turning that lesson onto quiet domestic subjects, women in rooms and gardens, ordinary afternoons. The Blaue Reiter circle he would help found still lay a year ahead. What ended it all came sooner than anyone thought: Macke was called up in 1914 and killed that first autumn of the war, 27 years old.