(Nolde, Schleswig 1867–1956 Seebüll)
Red flowers and a blue hyacinth, 1952/1955, signed Nolde, watercolor on japan paper, 34.5 x 46.5 cm, framed

Photo-Certificate:
Prof. Dr. Martin Urban, Seebüll, 24 March 1998

Provenance:
Galerie Orangerie-Reinz, Cologne
Private Collection, Switzerland – acquired from the above

Emil Nolde grew up together with four siblings on a farm in Schleswig-Holstein. Born Hans Emil Hansen, he named himself after his hometown Nolde at the beginning of his artistic career. This town and also the surrounding areas were a source of inspiration for Nolde’s painting for many years. For decades he painted a wide variety of colourful plants and flowers there and at his later residences.
“It’s mostly the little flower gardens that I paint again and again. I like them so much, these bright and joyful shining colours. They are quiet and beautiful those hours when you walk and sit among the fragrant and blooming flowers on a peaceful summer’s day. I would like my pictures to give something of this beauty. I myself have this feeling in front of the pictures”. (Martin Urban, Emil Nolde – Blumen und Tiere. Aquarelle und Zeichnungen, Cologne 1980, p. 7)
Emil Nolde looked for his first flower motifs in his parents’ garden, where he initially tried to capture the beauty of the plants using oil paint. From 1908 onwards, he then started using watercolours. It was through this painting technique in particular that Nolde succeeded in transferring the intense and contrasting hues of the plants onto paper. His use of Japan paper from 1912 onwards finally established his own technique within watercolour painting. The wet-on-wet technique produced a running together of the colours, which was deliberately chosen as a means of design. In the garden, plants stand close together, move in the wind and their blossoms overlap and obscure each other – the symbiosis of colours in wet-on-wet painting can capture this state and illustrate it. Nolde’s chosen blaze of colour creates the attraction that he himself felt in his numerous flower still-lifes and garden paintings, and so the motif accompanied him continuously throughout his artistic career.