August Macke was one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter. He lived during a particularly innovative time for German art: he saw the development of the main German Expressionist movements. Macke's career was cut short by his early death in the second month of the First World War at the front in Champagne France, on 26 September 1914. His final painting, Farewell, depicts the mood of gloom that settled after the outbreak of war.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th-century art.

Schmidt-Rottluff’s works stood out from his peers because of their balance of composition and simple form, which together served to exaggerate their flatness. He spent 1910 painting some of his most infamous landscape works that received recognition and fame. In December 1911, he and the other members of Die Brücke moved from Dresden to Berlin.