Nolde never lived far from the sea, he loved the wide sky above the flat land and the fast changing weather. The Seebüll house, which he had designed himself and where he and Ada had moved in 1928, also was not far from the sea. During the time of the national socialist ban of August 1941, which prohibited him from working as an artist, he painted there solely in watercolours, for he was afraid that the smell of oil paint would give away the fact that he was painting. It was not the large studio in which he worked, but a small room on the first floor of the house in Seebüll - the sewing room - which became his refuge and workroom.
He had experienced an important artistic breakthrough on the Danish fisher island of Alsen, where he and his wife Ada lived from 1903 to 1916. There, he discovered the depth of colour, and it became his central vehicle of artistic expression. "Yellow can paint happiness and pain. There is flame-red, blood-red and roseate. You have silver-blue, sky-blue and storm-blue. Each colour bears its own soul, to delight, disgust or animate me."
The exquisitely colourful watercolours of that time prove him to be the most accomplished watercolour painters of the 20th century.
