Macke painted this the year he met Fraz Marc. The style is that of all the young artists of this generation who were doing as the proto-modernists did. It reminds me a little of Picasso’s blue period. And also of Courbet. Macke’s farmboy has a farmboy’s dignity. He’s ‘uneasy in front of the camera’. His hands are solid, meaty. By the following year The Blue Rider had formed. Picasso and Braque had already wrenched apart any resemblence to the classical tradition. Macke radically broke away from the past. He was still not yet 25. (https://stillchaos.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/the-death-of-august-macke/)