"Tugboat on the Elbe, 1910"

Source: Emil Nolde, published in 1957

Description Title:


"The years 1909 and 1910 were critical for Nolde. The immediate visual perception, rendered by descriptive Impressionist methods, yields gradually to the inner image, to a unified vision expressing the painter's inner experience rather than the outward appearance of things. Nolde now set out to transform primarily descriptive means into expressive means. In 1909 Nolde effected this transformation in his treatment of religious subjects, in The Last Supper (color-plate 3) and Pentecost, in which drawing and color are wholly subordinated to the painter's inner vision.

In 1910 Nolde achieved similar results in his landscape oils and in his prints. The first subjects were provided by the port of Hamburg. For a few weeks Nolde rented a sailor's room near the water. Spending his days in a small boat, himself a part of the bustling scene, he one day had a vision that summed up his various experiences. At night he would rapidly outline the representational elements of this inner image with an etching needle on a copper plate. Gradually his vision took form as a tumultuous linear network of vigorous chiaroscuro. Thus the series of etchings of the port of Hamburg came into being. The mythical vision first realized in religious paintings now found pictorial expression in terms of a contemporary industrial landscape.

Nolde proceeded at once to extend to oil painting the discoveries he had made in the medium of etching. Tugboat on the Elbe reveals the same simplification of forms and heightening of color. The detailed treatment of natural appearance has given way to broad indications: the shimmering light of nature has yielded to a pictorial light spontaneously produced by the brilliant colors. A golden yellow covers the entire picture surface, and sky and water merge in its unrealistic brilliance. The golden tones are set off by a contrasting violet black, which summarily suggests the forms of the tugboat, the trail of smoke, and the reflection on the water, its function as much ornamental as depictive. The dramatic contrast between the two colors endows the subject with a fantastic quality, remote from the starting point in nature. The epic element has become image: the picture is a copy of the painter's inner experience of nature. Impressionism has been left behind. Nolde's feeling for the epic aspect of nature kept him attached to this theme for some time. Back on Alsen, he painted no fewer than fifteen seascapes. The sea was his first vehicle for giving pictorial expression to his vision of nature. The painting shown here is the first in a long series of epic and legendary pictures in which scenes from his native surroundings are raised to the rank of visual poetry."

Unique and distinctive. Suitable for framing.

*All prints are book plates / pages that are professionally removed from an original published book or other type of publication. May have text and or illustrations on reverse side.

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Condition: Very Good and well preserved. Light age toning and or occasional minor defects from how it was handled before it came to us may be present.

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