Emil Nolde's atmospheric watercolors attest to his position as the greatest colorist of the 20th century. In this field he achieved a mastery that has remained inimitable until today. In the summer of 1926, Nolde and his wife Ada discovered Seebüll, a marshy landscape near the German-Danish border. Attracted by the northern landscape with its floodplains and seemingly endless horizons, the artist built his house in Seebüll to follow the course of nature and the path of the sun. The tremendous view from Seebüll, the changing weather conditions and the artist's carefully tended flower garden became an important source of inspiration. Above all, the rather unspectacular flat Frisian landscape inspired him to inimitably intense and atmospheric watercolors, which became characteristic of the German expressionist. No one before him had seen this landscape this way and had depicted it with such a strong sympathy. Nolde lifted the northern landscape into a mystical transfiguration, subjecting the color palette entirely to his genius and thus creating a completely new image of it. It is not about spectacular topographical features. It is about the sky and the flat landscape that determine the pictorial event. But they do so in such an unusual way that everything we know about this landscape is eclipsed. We feel the vastness of the lush green meadows, our eyes can wander into the distance, and our minds are allowed to ease. "There are people who absolutely cannot understand that we, despite the options we have, prefer to live in this flat, 'boring' area, where there are no forests and no hills or mountains, and not even trees on the banks of the small waters. This is probably how all the fast passing travelers think. - Our landscape is modest, far from anything intoxicating, lush, we know that, but the intimate observer gets infinitely quiet, intimate beauty, austere grandeur and stormy wild life in return for his love." (Emil Nolde, Reisen, Ächtung, Befreiung: 1919-1946, Cologne 1978, p. 9). Emil Nolde remained faiernthful to his North German homeland throughout his life as a painter. The watercolors he created there are an expression of the artist's deeply felt and lifelong reverence for nature. [SM]