Lot 167 Dα

The present watercolour was very probably created in November of 1913, when Emil Nolde travelled around China for about four weeks while on his way to New Guinea. Beginning on 4 November, he journeyed by land and water along a route leading from Beijing through Hankou (Wuhan) and Shanghai and all the way to Hong Kong and Canton (Guangzhou). By way of what is now Indonesia, Nolde then finally reached New Guinea, the final station of his voyage.
Nolde's South Sea journey lasted nearly a year and first led the artist through Russia, Korea, Japan and China. It provided him with a flood of impressions. Recalling his stop in Hankou, Nolde wrote: “With my brush and paints, I worked like a man possessed; I only needed to raise my eyes from the paper, everything was images, everything around me images, the richest, uproarious, surging life, reflections, boats, people in unusual positions, and a haze between it all - and I painted incessantly, such that I fell down exhausted to death at the inn; it was hardly surprising.” (Emil Nolde, Welt und Heimat: Die Südseereise 1913-1918, Cologne 1965, p. 46) This quotation convincingly demonstrates that Nolde very rapidly produced his watercolours and drawings during his journey, which suited his already spontaneous painterly temperament.
Nolde's discovery of far-off lands was shaped by direct experience as well as contemporary ideas about the primitive. Presumably directly from the deck of a steamboat, the artist has used vigorous brushstrokes to capture the encounter between a traditional rowing boat and a modern steamer. Symbolically, the present work seems to reflect Nolde's prevailing impression of a “great sleeping China”, with the rich tradition of its culture increasingly finding itself confronted with the dominant influence of “Western high cultures”. (cf. Emil Nolde, Welt und Heimat: Die Südseereise 1913-1918, Cologne 1965, pp. 50ff.)
With regard to the motif, in this work Emil Nolde draws on sources including his 1910 maritime views of Hamburg's harbour and the Alster - a subject with which he had repeatedly occupied himself over the course of his career. Perhaps even more emphatically than the related watercolours of junks in the collection of Hanover's Sprengel Museum, this remarkable image demonstrates how authentically Nolde was able to capture the fragile exoticism of the foreign.