Little Walter's Toys

Macke painted this canvas in 1913, the year before his death at the Western Front, during the most productive and confident phase of his brief career. The painting depicts the toys of his son Walter, born 1910, and belongs to the intimate domestic subjects Macke returned to repeatedly alongside his cafe scenes and shop windows. Where Kandinsky and Marc sought the spiritual in abstraction, Macke was drawn to the material pleasures of everyday life, and this still life distils that instinct perfectly. The work was painted in Hilterfingen on Lake Thun, Switzerland, where Macke and his family spent extended periods, and it reflects the clarity and chromatic richness that the Alpine light inspired in him during those stays. The painting is held in a German private collection and has been exhibited in retrospectives tracing the arc of Der Blaue Reiter's short, explosive history. Macke was killed in September 1914 at Perthes-les-Hurlus, aged twenty-seven; the handful of years represented by works like this one stand among the most concentrated outpourings of color in early-twentieth-century European painting.