This land between the seas is enough for the entire life of an artist. A life with nature in the changing seasons and the course of the day. It is the landscape of his childhood where he settled with his wife Ada. The young couple married in 1902 and lived in Berlin and on the Danish island of Als. In 1916, they moved into a farmhouse on Utenwarf near the coast of the North Sea, however, extensive landscaping projects such as the construction of dikes and drainage systems forced the couple to leave again. In 1926, they acquired the dwelling mound Seebüll. They had finally found a location that corresponded to his ideas of a landscape with many birds and reed. A decision that came from the heart: “On long walks and journeys along the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein and around Hamburg we had been looking for a place. We found nothing. […] It wasn't until one afternoon when we stood in amazement on the high, empty dwelling mound that was part of Peter Jensen's property, as we saw a young horse galloping around us and the clouds in the sky, floating above the water. Everything was just marvelous, we looked at each other knowingly, and my Ada said: 'This is our place!'. I agreed with her, and we bought the plot in the blink of an eye.” (quoted from: Emil Nolde, Reisen, Ächtung, Befreiung, 1978, pp. 80/81)

Nolde felt nature in the spirit of Romanticism, which explains why he not only depicted the landscape’s external appearance like flowers and sky, but why he also found hues that correspond to the sensation one has when looking at them. Just like music, the colors touch the soul. Over the course of his artistic creation, the artist increasingly relied on this quality of the colors; they became the actual medium of his artistic identity. From the barren landscape of the north, which is always exposed to a changing lighting, Nolde extracted atmospheric works that make up a large part of his entire artistic output. The high sky above lowlands in which every elevation is a special occurrence, with the clouds passing in ever new appearance, is the core motif of almost all of these works. The drama of the sky determines the drama of the picture’s message. This shows Nolde's high level of artistic empathy that he feels for his native landscape. Changing daytime and weather moods - such as a particularly glowing sunset here - are the basic tone of all these Frisian landscape compositions, which, even in their apparent repetition of the subjects, never wear out in flat naturalism. This is why his colorful watercolors have such a large circle of admirers and why they have remained unrivaled up until today. [SM]