Watercolors occupy a particularly large part of Emil Nolde's oeuvre. Nolde did not regard watercolor as a technique useful for what cannot be realized in painting, but rather as a completely independent means of expressing and, above all, interpreting color so pure and transparent. His efforts to give colors a particular luminosity, especially in watercolors, by working into the wet Japon in order to allow the color body to be fully absorbed by the paper, have earned him the reputation of being an innovator of this old technique. But it is particularly their colorful subjects, the flowers and the landscapes, that have won such a large circle of admirers. Every single watercolor by Emil Nolde fills an entire wall and radiate from afar. Viewers are drawn to the luminous images even before they recognize what is depicted. It was the flowers, that gave Nolde color. They gave him the courage to use the color freely and purely. The first flower pictures were created in 1906 and he would intensively work on the motif for the next two years. Until then his flower paintings had all been oil paintings. The first large floral watercolors were probably created in Utenwarf. Unfortunately, the development of this technology is difficult to understand. Nolde dated very few of his watercolors. Although it is possible to identify certain time frames for certain topics in his oeuvre, this is not the case with flower watercolors. They make up a unified group that runs through his entire work. One thing that is certain is the fact that the garden in Seebüll served as an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Since diking and drainage plans threatened to destroy the original landscape around Utenwarf, the Noldes were forced to give up their home. In 1927 they acquired an empty terp on which they built the Seebüll residence and studio house by 1937. They wrest a large area from the swampy marsh. To use this as a flower garden, they created drainage ditches and build high reed walls to protect the garden from wind and storms, common phenomena of the land. In 1928, Nolde told his long-time friend Hans Fehr "about our young garden with its swelling abundance of flowers", "as beautiful as we have never had it before." The garden, created in the shape of their initials A and E, for Ada and Emil, was soon realized and would be the Noldes pride and joy, Its lush blossoms would inspire Emil Nolde's art for the rest of his artistic career. Flowers are the main protagonists of his compositions; their surroundings hardly play a role at all. He characterized each individual flower head, it almost feels as if he captured their personality. The exotic iris with its dark violet colors and eccentric petals is at the heart of the present composition, surrounded by cheerfully glowing fire lilies and coneflowers. The contrasting colors fan one another in their luminosity. Nolde's flowers are expressions of a longing for a perfection of color that can fulfill its true purpose. The color dominates the picture and is an expression of an emphatic enthusiasm for the pure experience of nature, which Nolde uses to visualize it in his own, unmistakable way. [SM]