Lot 151 D

For Erich Heckel and his wife Sidi Riha, Osterholz would become a blissful place. In 1913 they discovered the little village on the Flensburg Firth and, except for the interruption of the First World War, they spent their summer months there by the Baltic Sea. Accordingly, they were back again from May to November of 1919, purchasing the secluded, locally typical, thatched-roof farmhouse and the small property belonging to it directly next to the steep coast. The watercolour depicts the path to the farmhouse, which leads through the garden they had put in, and Heckel has noted the luminously blue water of the Baltic in the background. The artist converted the attic into a large studio space, having a large window cut into the front of the house and the exposed framework of the roof covered with wooden boards on which he painted pictures. With this wall painting, a luxuriant floral landscape composition featuring seated and standing nudes, he created a vigorously decorated space of the kind familiar from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's and Otto Mueller's studio homes. Heckel also repeated details from the cyclical composition in paintings and watercolours - and ultimately the landscape around Osterholz, the steep coast, the beach and the Baltic Sea would become a distinctive motif defining his work.