August Macke

August Macke masterfully captures the lightness of a summer stroll with confidently placed lines and hatching. In the foreground is a couple walking towards the viewer. The lady is wearing an elaborate hat to protect her from the sun. The contours of the hat and the tight-fitting dress emphasise the modernity of the sitter. Her companion is wearing a very elegant suit whose fine cloth emphasises his slender figure. He is also wearing a hat - a bowler hat, the most popular hat of the late 19th and early 20th century. In the centre and background are other men, depicted rather dimly, who draw the viewer's gaze into the depths of the picture. As they are also wearing suits and hats, one might jump to the conclusion that this is a festive event from today's perspective. If we move our gaze to the right, however, we recognise a rather casually depicted man leaning over a balustrade. This allows us to locate the work very clearly geographically. The sitters are on the shore of Lake Thun, where the artist moved with his wife in October 1913. The citizens of the wealthy city are depicted taking a Sunday stroll. The scene is framed by lush vegetation and trees. On the right is the balustrade typical of the lakeside promenade, as we know it from the main works ‘Promenade’ (1913, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, CR 527), ‘Lady in a Green Jacket’ (1913, Museum Ludwig Cologne, CR 521), ‘Walk on the Bridge’ (1913, Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, CR 482) and other paintings in museum collections.

Walkers and strollers were a very important subject for Macke. While he had painted them the previous year in the zoological garden in his home town of Bonn, it is now strollers in front of the shop window of the arcades in Thun and walkers by the lake that occupy Macke in this extremely happy phase of his life. The cheerful hustle and bustle far away from the art world, nature, but above all the happy life with his family and the proximity to his artist friends Louis Moilliet and Paul Klee inspired the artist to create what are probably his strongest works. Stylistically, these are influenced by Cubism, but the artist's almost uncontrollable creativity allows him to develop his own, particularly lively, expressive style, which is very finely observant, but also knows how to balance the composition of his paintings very clearly.

You can see a very similar charcoal drawing in the Franz Marc Museum. The author of the catalogue raisonné, Ursula Heiderich, compares our sheet with this drawing as follows: The ink drawing appears more spatial and detailed, it was possibly created first.1

1 Ursula Heiderich, ‘August Macke - Zeichnungen - Werkverzeichnis’, Stuttgart 1993, p. 626.