Lot 14 D

In addition to his images of figures and flowers, Emil Nolde’s watercolour landscapes are among his most important creations. With the lightness of his brushwork and his sure sense for selecting colours, Nolde produced fascinating pictures of the North Frisian landscape around him in direct contact with nature and without preliminary drawing: “Sometimes I also painted when it was freezing in the evening hours, and I enjoyed it when the colours solidified on the paper in crystalline stars and rays” (Emil Nolde, Mein Leben, Cologne 1990, p. 144). In keeping with this, the present watercolour “Abend über Nordfriesland” was presumably also created outdoors and not far from Nolde’s home in Utenwarf. Along the horizon, joined to the narrow strip depicting the green pastures, we find isolated farmsteads that nearly dissolve beneath the flaming red, yellow and violet of the sky. A natural spectacle as dramatic as that of this evening is scarcely to be found anywhere outside of Nolde’s North Frisian homeland, where he settled permanently in 1916, following stations in Munich, Berlin and on the Danish island of Als.
The artistic models for Nolde’s work include the watercolours of William Turner, which he had seen at the Tate Gallery. Like no other artist, this Englishman captured his native landscape and the sea in every kind of weather and under a variety of lighting conditions in his numerous watercolours. While Turner had mostly painted along the southern coast of England, Nolde now looked out at the same sea from the east (cf. Emil Nolde. Glühender Farbenrausch, Cologne 2018, p. 30). However, neither of them was ever interested in creating an exact reproduction of nature – what concerned them was the subjective realisation of an atmosphere defined by light, wind and water.