.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Professor Dr Manfred Reuther of the Nolde Stiftung Seebüll has
confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Vividly painted flowers occupy pride of place within Nolde's oeuvre. His delicate watercolours of flowers on Japan paper perfectly embody his desire to create art that blossomed as organically as nature did. Nolde's first important pictures date from 1906 and depict the flowers and garden motifs that he had been magnetically drawn to when living in Als Island. As Nolde sought to capture the blooming flowers in their riot of colours, he developed what was to become his own inimitable use of expressive colour, which would lead to an invitation to join the influential Die Brücke group of painters. At the artist's later homes in Utenwarf and Seebüll, he and his wife planted sumptuous gardens of extraordinary richness that contrasted with the surrounding marshy landscape and provided him with a fertile source of inspiration. Nolde was deeply fascinated by the symbolic connotations of flowers, which represented, to him, the eternal circle of birth, life and death: 'I loved the flowers and their destiny: shooting up, blooming, radiating, glowing, gladdening, drooping, wilting, and ultimately thrown away and dying. Our human destinies are by no means always so logical or so beautiful' (E. Nolde, Jahre de Kämpfe, Berlin, 1934, p.228).
confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Vividly painted flowers occupy pride of place within Nolde's oeuvre. His delicate watercolours of flowers on Japan paper perfectly embody his desire to create art that blossomed as organically as nature did. Nolde's first important pictures date from 1906 and depict the flowers and garden motifs that he had been magnetically drawn to when living in Als Island. As Nolde sought to capture the blooming flowers in their riot of colours, he developed what was to become his own inimitable use of expressive colour, which would lead to an invitation to join the influential Die Brücke group of painters. At the artist's later homes in Utenwarf and Seebüll, he and his wife planted sumptuous gardens of extraordinary richness that contrasted with the surrounding marshy landscape and provided him with a fertile source of inspiration. Nolde was deeply fascinated by the symbolic connotations of flowers, which represented, to him, the eternal circle of birth, life and death: 'I loved the flowers and their destiny: shooting up, blooming, radiating, glowing, gladdening, drooping, wilting, and ultimately thrown away and dying. Our human destinies are by no means always so logical or so beautiful' (E. Nolde, Jahre de Kämpfe, Berlin, 1934, p.228).