Lighthouses that dominate coasts and landscapes with their strangely elongated architecture, exert a great appeal on the "Brücke" artists. Kirchner not only dedicated several works to the Staberhuk lighthouse on Fehmarn, he even moved into an apartment of the lighthouse keeper during his summer stays from 1912 to 1914. In Heckel's landscapes, which were created during his stay in Ostend during the First World War, the lighthouse sometimes dominates the motif. And lighthouses can also be discovered in Pechstein's Nidden landscapes from 1911 onwards. In this view of the striking lighthouse in Jershöft in Pomerania (today the Polish seaside resort of Jaroslawiec), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff surpasses his former artist friends in the execution‘s dynamic.

In the summer of 1920, Schmidt-Rottluff, left Berlin for the fishing village of Jershöft for the first time. It had an unusual lighthouse as a landmark: a brick tower built in 1865 with slight gradations, some 35 meters tall. In one of his first paintings, which he painted at this location in 1920, the tower appears with a windmill, in between a farmstead under a sky with moving clouds. Two years later, this watercolor which shows plenty of euphoria was made: Schmidt-Rottluff rendered the tower in an exaggerated manner, lets the defensive giant in its upwardly tapering gradation literally soar into the sky, swaying in the storm. The wind-blown trees and the house next to the lighthouse are also included in the moving, futuristic-looking composition. The former architecture student was visibly impressed by the unusual design of the tower and expresses this feeling in a both enthusiastic and grotesque way. [MvL]