Nolde was not just a flower painter, even though this theme occupies a prime position in his oeuvre. While he tried to capture the seemingly infinite plenty of the pansies and tulips in his early oil paintings made in the garden of his family home, he chose the watercolor as the suitable medium for his illustrations of flowers at a later point. Nolde's love for flowers goes back to his childhood and was part of his entire artistic career. It is the colors' purity and liberty, just as it is the case in our work, but also the combination of fugacity and beauty that fascinated the artist anew time and again. "I love the flowers' blossoming colors and their purity. I love the flowers and their destiny: sprouting, blooming, glowing, making us happy, declining, withering and eventually disposed of. Our human fate in many cases is not likewise coherent and beautiful [.]" (quote after Martin Urban, Emil Nolde. Blumen und Tiere. Watercolors and drawings, Cologne 1965, pp. 7-8).