Milliner's Shop

August Macke spent the summer months of 1914, like previous ones, with his family in Hilterfingen on the Thuner Lake. The shops in the streets of the Old Town of Thun and the surrounded landscape constantly reappear as motifs in the artist’s works. This includes the hat store which, like other clothing stores, fascinated the artist pictorially and inspired him to a series of shop window paintings, to which he attached considerable import. Delaunay’s window paintings (Les fenêtres simultanées) with their complex play of painted reflections of light and mirroring doubtless served as an inspiration for August Macke. However, he chose a calmer, seemingly static composition. Only the colorful hats on display counteract the woman with the parasol’s statue-like pose. The hat shop façade, like the showcase walls, are strictly structured geometric planes.