Anyone who has ever traveled to the north of Germany will be amazed by the abundance of flowers in home gardens. After all, you would expect a rather sparse flora in a landscape dominated by wind and rain. But flowers seem to love the humid sea air, and so the flower garden that Emil Nolde and his wife Ada planted in Seebüll has long since become an admired legend, in competition with the works of the master, who found the most beautiful inspiration for his famous watercolors in his garden. Less interested in botanical identification, Emil Nolde elevated the flower, or rather the blossom as such, to a pictorial subject and gave the color an intense significance that goes far beyond their botanical aspect. It dominates the pictorial narrative and is the expression of an emphatic enthusiasm for the pure experience of nature, which Nolde uses for his purposes to visualize it in a very unique and unmistakable way.

When Emil Nolde took the brush to paint one of his flower watercolors, he did so with the passion of an admirer of the natural intensity of color, which he wanted to render as\~unadulterated\~as possible. Nolde explored the technical potential of the technique himself, and in using pure watercolor tones on wet paper, he achieved the extraordinary result that the colors act entirely\~on their own. Such an approach requires the utmost concentration on the subject, which Emil Nolde renders almost exclusively on a large scale that seems to transcend the pictorial limits. Yet all the emotional power\~that lies\~in his compositions is subordinate to a purely luminous effect. It is the visual magic that these silent documents of his emotional eye emanate.

For Emil Nolde, color is the essential element, the essential means of expression in his art. "Yellow can paint happiness and also pain. There is fire red, blood red, and rose red. There is silver blue, sky blue, and storm blue. Each color carries its soul, making me happy or repulsive and stimulating" (Emil Nolde, quoted from: Martin Urban, Emil Nolde - Landschaften. Aquarelle und Zeichnungen, Cologne 2002, p. 16). The present work also demonstrates the painter's passion. Against the neutral background, the colors unfold that mysterious luminosity that only Nolde was able to achieve. [MH]