Porträt mit Äpfeln: Frau des Künstlers

August Robert Ludwig Macke was a German Expressionist painter. He was one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter. He lived during a particularly active time for German art: he saw the development of the main German Expressionist movements as well as the arrival of the successive avant-garde movements which were forming in the rest of Europe. As an artist of his time, Macke knew how to integrate into his painting the elements of the avant-garde which most interested him. Like his friend Franz Marc and Otto Soltau, he was one of the young German artists who died in the First World War.

Portrait with Apples, also known as Elisabeth with Apples, is an oil-on-canvas painting executed in 1909 by the German Expressionist painter August Macke. It shows his wife Elisabeth Gerhardt and was created shortly after their wedding. Macke had studied the work of the Fauve artists during his honeymoon in Paris, and the painting shows their influence. It marks the beginning of his public artistic appreciation. The work belongs to the collection of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, in Munich.