Deckengemälde in vier Teilen, Putten, Blumen und Früchte darstellend (Nacht und Morgen)

Deckengemälde in vier Teilen, Putten, Blumen und Früchte darstellend (Nacht und Morgen) — Ceiling Painting in Four Parts Depicting Putti, Flowers and Fruit (Night and Morning) — of 1865, in the Munich Central Collecting Point, is Makart's most explicitly decorative early work: a multi-panel ceiling painting designed to be viewed in situ as part of an architectural interior. Putti, flowers, and fruit are the standard vocabulary of Baroque ceiling decoration, and Makart's adoption of this tradition at age twenty shows early understanding of the decorative painting market that would sustain his career. The Night and Morning subtitle suggests an allegorical scheme based on the time-of-day cycle, a common organizing principle for multi-part ceiling programs in aristocratic interiors. The Munich Central Collecting Point provenance indicates this was among the works displaced by Nazi acquisition programs and recovered after the war.

Multi-panel ceiling programs require systematic color and compositional planning to ensure visual coherence when viewed from below across multiple surfaces. Makart's warm, light-saturated palette is well-suited to ceiling decoration, where the upward-facing surfaces need to appear luminous against the overhead viewing angle. The putti, flowers, and fruit elements are rendered with loose, confident strokes appropriate for overhead viewing distances.