About this work
*Forest Stream* (*Waldbach*) is an oil on canvas painted in 1910, nearly square in format at approximately 61.6 × 61.4 cm. Water cuts through the composition in a sinuous path, flanked by the dense vertical architecture of trees whose canopies press close to the picture plane. The palette belongs unmistakably to the Expressionist moment: greens deepen toward teal and emerald in the shadowed undergrowth, while patches of sky filter through in cool blues, and the stream itself catches reflected light in strokes of white and pale gold. Macke's style here is defined by vivid, bright colors and bold draughtsmanship, yet the scene retains a hush — there is no human presence, only the implied sound of moving water and the pressure of living vegetation. His harmonising imagery creates a powerful feeling of serenity that distinguishes *Forest Stream* from the more charged or anxious landscapes being produced by his contemporaries at the same moment.
*Forest Stream* dates to 1910, the year Macke, through his friendship with Franz Marc, met Kandinsky and began engaging with the non-objective aesthetic and the symbolic interests of Der Blaue Reiter.
These friendships were built on a shared interest in Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Fauvism — and both Macke and Marc expressed a spiritual fascination for landscapes and nature in their initial paintings, often worked *en plein air*.
Other 1910 landscapes, such as *Staudacher's House at the Tegernsee* and *Tegernsee Landscape*, situate Macke in the Bavarian countryside during this period — and *Forest Stream* belongs to the same productive outdoor practice. It predates his transformative encounters with Robert Delaunay's Orphism and the Tunisian light of 1914, making it a document of Macke's Expressionist foundation: already luminous and chromatic, but rooted in observed nature rather than prismatic abstraction. The work was exhibited in the landmark *Franz Marc and August Macke, 1909
