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August Robert Ludwig Macke was born in Germany on 3 January 1887, in Meschede, Westphalia. He was the only son of August Friedrich Hermann Macke (1845–1904), a building contractor and amateur artist, and his wife, Maria Florentine, née Adolph, (1848–1922), who came from a farming family in Westphalia’s Sauerland region. Shortly after August’s birth the family settled at Cologne, where Macke was educated at the Kreuzgymnasium (1897-1900) and became a friend of Hans Thuar, who also became an artist. In 1900, when he was thirteen, the family moved to Bonn, where Macke studied at the Realgymnasium du poissons and became a friend of Walter Gerhardt and Gerhardt’s sister, Elisabeth, whom he married a few years later.

The first artistic works to make an impression on the boy were his father’s drawings, the Japanese prints collected by his friend Thuar’s father and the works of Arnold Böcklin which he saw on a visit to Basel in 1900. In 1904 Macke’s father died, and in that year Macke enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, under Adolf Maennchen (1904-1906). During this period he also took evening classes under Fritz Helmut Ehmke (1905), did some work as a stage and costume designer at the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, and visited northern Italy (1905) and Netherlands, Belgium and Britain (1906).

Thereafter Macke lived most of his creative life in Bonn, with the exception of a few periods spent at Lake Thun in Switzerland and various trips to Paris, Italy, the Netherlands and Tunisia. In Paris, where he traveled for the first time in 1907, Macke saw the work of the Impressionists, and shortly after he went to Berlin and spent a few months in Lovis Corinth’s studio. His style was formed within the mode of French Impressionism and Post-impressionism and later went through a Fauve period.

In 1909 he married Elisabeth Gerhardt. Macke discovered the work of Henri Matisse and the other Fauve artists while visiting Paris in 1909; this convinced Macke to use brighter, less-naturalistic colours, applied in broad brushstrokes. The same year, he met the young Expressionist painter Franz Marc in Munich, Germany, and the two began to work closely, developing a more abstract and colourful style. In 1911 Macke joined Der Blaue Reiter, which had been founded by Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. Macke avoided the often violent style of his fellow Expressionists, and he preferred human subjects to the animals that Marc and Kandinsky portrayed. In Three Girls in a Barque (1911), Macke combined the many styles he had recently discovered: the figures are rendered in flat colours and graceful lines reminiscent of Matisse, while the background is sweeping and abstract, with bright patches of colour that are distinctly in the manner of Kandinsky.

In 1912 Macke met the French painter Robert Delaunay, who worked in a colourful Cubist-influenced style called Orphism. Subsequently, Macke introduced a Cubist analysis of form into his own paintings. Throughout the evolution of his style, Macke generally remained faithful to Impressionist subject matter, portraying contemporary scenes of urban leisure. His Shops Windows can be considered a personal interpretation of Delaunay’s Windows, combined with the simultaneity of images found in Italian Futurism.

In 1914 Macke traveled with the Swiss painter Paul Klee to Tunis, Tunisia, where Macke painted a series of works that place the subject upon a grid of various pure colours. The emphasis on colour in these paintings, which are some of his most widely admired works, demonstrate the effect that Delaunay’s Orphic Cubism had upon him. During this period he produced a series of works now considered masterpieces.

Macke’s career was cut short by his early death in the second month of the First World War at the front in Champagne, France, on 26 September 1914. His final painting, Farewell, depicts the mood of gloom that settled after the outbreak of war. This was also the same year that he painted the famous painting Türkisches Café in München (1914).

At a 1997 Christie’s auction, Macke’s The Couple at a Garden Table (1914) was sold for £2 million. Market in Tunis (1914) sold for £2.86 million ($4.1 million) in 2000. Consigned by the estate of Ernst Beyeler, the artist’s In the Bazar (1914) was auctioned for £3.96 million – then four and a half times the high estimate – at Christie’s in 2011.