Watercolour entitled 'Friesland Farm under Red Clouds' by Emil Nolde. German School, ca. 1930.

View of landscape, with low horizon, farm buildings in red and blue at left beneath a dark sky with large diagonal area of red cloud.

The area depicted is North Friesland, the western coastal area of Schleswig-Holstein. Nolde had a house there - in Seebull - where he moved in 1927. This watercolour was in the 'Emil Nolde' exhibition, Marlborough Fine Art, 1964, No. 53 (repr.).

Werner Haftmann, curator of the Nolde Museum in Seebull, writes tellingly of the roots of Nolde's art : 'It sprang directly from his native soil, that lonely, flat coast spread between sea and sky, up near the Danish border under whose tall sky, marked by flaming light effects and dramatic cloud formations, objects and people acquire a strange legendary quality. The setting itself strongly intensifies the visionary faculty of its inhabitants.'


Nolde was formally allied to the radical Expressionists 'Die Brucke' in 1906 but his intense individuality made it difficult for him to sustain communal activity and although his work had and retained a powerful expressionist character, he withdrew his membership of the group in 1907.

[Rosemary Miles, '100 Great Paintings from the V&A', p.194]

Nolde's landscapes (and his studies of flowers) have an intense visionary quality which is emphasized by his use of vivid colours. His native landscape - Friesland in Germany, near the border with Denmark, was characterised by dramatic light effects and cloud formations. Nolde was associated with the radical Expressionist art group 'Die Brucke', but tempermentally he preferred to work in isolation, and was only formally allied to the group for a year around 1906-7.

P.7-1964