Marshland

Details

With a confirmation from the Nolde Foundation Seebüll dated 8 May 2024. The work is registered with the Foundation under the number Reg. no. Fr.A.1863 and will be included in a future catalogue raisonné of Emil Nolde’s watercolours and drawings.

Provenance:

Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; acquired from the previous owner in 1965;

Company collection, Europe.

Description

– Typical landscape watercolour by Nolde with a low horizon line and dramatic cloud formations

– The artist depicts the marsh landscape in expressive colours

– Nolde takes up the tradition of Romantic landscape painting in his watercolours

From 1938, Emil Nolde and his wife Ada retired from his Berlin studio, to which he never returned and which was destroyed in 1944 along with many of his paintings, to their house by the sea in Seebüll. In the summer of 1926, Nolde discovered Seebüll, a marshy landscape near the German-Danish border. Attracted by the northern landscape with its meadows and seemingly endless lines of sky, the artist built his house in Seebüll to follow the course of nature and the path of the sun. The expansive view from Seebüll, the changeable weather and the artist’s carefully tended flower garden become an important source of inspiration.

In his marshland landscapes, Nolde confronts the viewer with the infinite expanse of sky and earth, thus taking up a tradition of Romantic landscape painting. He favours low horizon lines, above which the dramatic sky bends endlessly over the fields. In the present watercolour, the wind drives dark purple, heavy rain clouds over a lush green landscape, which is only dimly illuminated by the sulphur-yellow evening light.

There are basically no people in these landscapes. Here, the artist draws on the Romantic idea of unbridled nature and the nothingness of people. In his autobiography, the artist himself speaks of his “romantically fantastic free work”. Martin Urban writes: “Thus his landscape paintings – now entirely in the spirit of the Romantic landscape art of Caspar David Friedrich – are not mere mood paintings, but true ‘landscapes of the soul’, free and direct expressions of artistic and human experience.” (Martin Urban, Emil Nolde Landscapes: Watercolours and Drawings, Cologne 1969, p. 7).