About this work
*In Front of the Hat Shop* was painted in 1913 in the Orphist style — and it announces itself through colour before anything else. The canvas shows a woman and a small girl, wholly absorbed in contemplating a shop window, oblivious to the painter's watching eye. The woman's jacket blazes in warm red against the cooler tones of the street facade, and her clothing, predominantly warm reds and yellows, corresponds to the hats displayed on stands inside the window, decorated with ribbons and feathers.
The composition is arranged along clear diagonal perspective lines, with the geometric shape of the stone facade, carved pilasters, and shop window fitting together like mosaic stones to form an integrated unit.
Light breaks in the glass; reflections mix inside and outside, blurring the boundary between spaces and surfaces.
The attraction of the work lies mainly in the clear and firm power of the composition and the radiant expressive power of the contrasting colours.
Macke had moved with his wife Elisabeth to Hilterfingen, on Lake Thun in Switzerland, in late 1913, where the small, orderly bourgeois town inspired a series of quiet, subdued compositions — and hat shop windows in particular became a recurring obsession.
In the early 1910s, shortly before his death at the front, Macke painted a number of works paying tribute to the beauty of everyday life, four of which are devoted to the hat shop alone. The series owes a clear debt to his 1912 encounter with Robert Delaunay in Paris: Delaunay's *Windows* paintings, with their complex play of painted reflections of light and mirroring, doubtless served as an inspiration.
These works share a focus on everyday life and the passing moment familiar from the Impressionists, and although a formalizing abstraction creates a certain detachment, they nevertheless radiate a striking positivity.
On a wall, this painting rewards unhurried rooms — a sitting room, a study, anywhere that a painting can be looked at rather than glanced at. The radiant yellows, bright reds, and strong blues carry the intensity and unique luminosity typical of Macke's work , meaning it holds its own in natural light without overwhelming a space. It speaks to the viewer who finds genuine pleasure in the unremarkable made beautiful: a pause on the pavement, a child's distraction, a hat in a window. Macke used colour like a musician uses tones, chords, and scales — and this small, quietly radical painting hums with exactly that kind of harmony.
