"Sitzende im Grünen" has an illustrious provenance. Shortly after it was painted in Dangast in the summer of 1910, Dr. Viktor and Hedda Peters acquired this painting. The Leipzig collector couple was one of the earliest patrons of the "Brücke" artists, especially Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, with whom they were in a long and deep friendship. The work shows Gertrud Schmidt, the painter's sister, and Heinz Spielmann assumes: She repeatedly visited her brother in the fishing village, and the artist had never depicted a figure in the landscape in a painting before. (Die Maler der Brücke. Die Sammlung Hermann Gerlinger, Halle 2007, cat. no. 70)

The artist’s endeavors in painting in Dangast in 1910 proved to be groundbreaking, both in terms of pictorial and compositional accomplishments. In 1910, the tendency to simplify the motifs into surface zones framed by dark contours or the blank canvas intensified. With a loose brushstroke, Schmidt-Rottluff sketched the landscape around his studio in a virtuoso manner with an eruptive color presence. "Einfahrt" and "Deichdurchbruch" are outstanding examples of this dynamically animated stylistic development. Watercolors from 1909 and 1910 suggest what should become the content of his paintings, too: the pursuit of simplification combined with a subjective, colorful interpretation of the landscape. "Schmidt-Rottluff no longer imitates nature, he recreates it" (quoted from Magdalena M. Moeller). Through a reduction to what is essential, the contraction of a narrow and wide perspective on one level, and the juxtaposition of strong and boldly placed color contrasts, the intense, striking effect is also achieved in this painting "Sitzende im Grünen": a harmonious unity of man and nature with daring contrasts and a new color palette typical of the ingenious "Brücke" style of 1910 that was probably perceived as shocking in those days. "In 1910, he applied the accomplishments he had made in watercolor to his paintings," says Schmidt-Rottluff expert Magdalena M. Moeller, longtime director of the Brücke Museum in Berlin. "The oil paint was applied highly diluted. It was as if the artist was more like drawing with the brush instead of painting. The thin paint allowed for a quick and facile application. A large number of paintings were created in the new technique. In close succession, Schmidt-Rottluff produced one masterpiece after another, as he had attained great mastery in all means. The colors are radiant and luminous, the forms more clearly defined and yet vibrate with energy. The previous bands of lines had evolved into short gestural brushstrokes, often clustered as surface structures. Jagged contours sometimes delimit the surface elements. Schmidt-Rottluff's new gestural language reflects the emotion of the creative process and the inspiration of the moment. Just as it is the case in his watercolors, he deliberately left parts of the canvas blank." (Quoted from: M. M. Moeller, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Eine Monographie, Munich 2010, p. 30)

On his way from Impressionism to Expressionism, Schmidt-Rottluff attained a fascinating intermediate stage that Ernst Ludwig Kirchner later called a "monumental Impressionism" in his 1912 chronicle. But there is even more to that: "Sitzende im Grünen" is a prime example in which some of the color forms and color surfaces clash very hard, while the confidence in his style was so strong, that its effect and the monumental expressiveness will be preserved for future admirers. Schmidt-Rottluff reached a first creative peak before World War I. What began to show in the painting "Straße im Norden", made during a visit at Emil Nolde in 1906, becomes a certainty in the explosion of colors we find in this work. [MvL]