August Mack was born in 1887, in Meschede, Westphalia, Germany. He died in1914 at the front in WWI. He started as a member of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) school of painting with Kandinsky and Marz. When he lived in Hilterfingen, Lake Thun, Switzerland, he painted the window shoppers of the town, with a noted predilection for fashionable hatted ladies shopping for hats.

In 1937, the most famous of the series, Woman with Umbrella in Front of a Hat Shop, had the distinction of being confiscated by the Nazis as degenerate art.