Emil Nolde was born as Emil Hansen in 1867 in Nolde, a village in the German-Danish border region. After completing his apprenticeship as a wood sculptor and then attending the School of Applied Arts in Karlsruhe until 1891 and after working for several years as a drawing teacher at the Industrial and Commercial Museum in St. Gallen, he decided to become a freelance painter. From 1896 to 1900, he studied at the private Friedrich Fehr School in Munich. At time he made numerous trips to Vienna, Milan and Paris and was inspired by the paintings of Titian, Rembrandt, Böcklin, Leibls and Marées. In 1906, he briefly became a member of the artist group "Die Brücke", and in 1908 he joined the Berlin Secession. Nolde excluded the latter in 1910 due to a dispute, and he then became active as a co-founder of the "New Secession". In 1912 he took part in the "Blauer Reiter" exhibitions and presented numerous exhibitions in Berlin, Jena, Hamburg and Munich. Between 1913 and 1914, Nolde and his wife took part in an expedition to the South Seas. On the occasion of his 60th birthday, a large-scale retrospective of his work took place in Dresden. In 1937, the National Socialist regime placed him at the center of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition and in 1941 issued an absolute ban on painting, which he ignored. Nolde described the small-format watercolors created during this period as his "unpainted pictures". After 1945 he received many honors for his work.