During his studies at the art academy in Düsseldorf, Carl Vinnen met Fritz Mackensen and Otto Modersohn, with whom he spent the summer of 1889 on his father's estate in Osterndorf near Bremerhaven. The two artist friends were about to found their artist colony some 25 kilometers away in Worpswede. The young painters also caused a stir with their landscapes in the Annual Exhibition at the Glass Palace in Munich in 1895. Although Vinnen never settled directly in Worpswede, he was often looking for his motifs together with the Worpswede artists in the impressive moor landscape, and participated in their exhibitions, so that at times he was even perceived as the head of the group. He also shared their mystical contemplative view of the landscape, in which nature was no longer just seen as an inaccessible counterpart, but as part of a living cosmos. The painters were particularly fascinated by the light, slender young birch trees with their fairy-like appearance in front of the moorland landscape, which is characterized by brown, dark green and violet tones. In the mostly deserted views, often in the shadow of twilight or shrouded in fog, they become the emblematic motif of the artist colony in Worpswede, which was so important for the development of landscape painting in Germany. [KT]