In the summer of 1930, Nolde painted a series of six exquisite seascapes while staying on the island of Sylt with a window looking on to the North Sea. He titled the paintings Meer and labeled them A-F; the present work is the fifth in the series.

Nolde stayed in Kampen on the island of Sylt from late July to late October 1930. It was here that he wrote the first volume of his autobiography and started work on a new and definitive inventory of his paintings. In his autobiography, Nolde wrote fondly of this isolated yet eventful summer on the coast:

Nolde grew up near the coast and spent almost all his life near the ocean, memorializing it often in painting. His Meer series of 1930 counts among Nolde’s most concerted and impressive attempts to create a visual equivalent of the imposing and powerful elemental force which stirred his emotions and consumed his imagination. “I think it is most important to give freedom to art and one should not force art into a corset”, remarked Nolde. “One should be guided by nature whilst lending a free spirit to one's fantasy and experience. Whatever is depicted, be it truth, fantasy or poetry, the best paintings are the ones which seem true, natural, organic and alive” (quoted in Exh. Cat., Cologne, Kunsthalle Köln, Emil Nolde , 1973, p. 38).

Nolde’s first summer studio was a wooden hut he erected in 1903 on the edge of the beach on the island of Aslen, where he described looking out of the window for hours just to observe the sea closely in all its moods. The quasi-mystical dimension of Meer E is fundamental to many of Nolde’s recorded observations of his relationship with the sea, couched in spiritual terms. Recalling one stormy crossing, he describes standing on the open deck of a boat, leaning far over the rail to experience the power and strength of the elements: “I stood gripping the rail, gazing, and wondering as the waves and the ship tossed me up and down. For years afterwards, that day remained so vividly in my mind that I incorporated it into my sea paintings with their wild, mountainous green waves and only at the topmost edge a sliver of sulfurous sky” (quoted in Exh. Cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Emile Nolde, 1995, p. 132).

One of the striking features of Nolde’s Meer series is the lack of coastline or any form of life; the overpowering focus is on the nature of the sky and sea. “As the wind above the ocean meets the land, it rises abruptly to cause the unusually turbulent cloud formations that often feature in Nolde’s paintings. Since his childhood he had been fascinated by such clouds and their procession across the sky, thinking of them as free, natural forms that, unlike the land, could never be t.mes d by the ‘improving' hand of man” (Averil King, Emil Nolde: Artist of the Elements, London, 2013, p. 19). The approach prompts comparisons with his Scandinavian precursor, August Strindberg, whose 1901 painting Wave V (fig. 3) was also the fifth in a series of paintings that focus purely on the awe-inspiring power of the sea and seem to anticipate the expressionism of Nolde.

The present work was in the collects ion of Nolde’s estate at Seebüll until 1964. As Martin Urban notes, “Nolde regarded the paintings as his ‘mental children’, to whom he dedicated all his care. When he gave them away he wanted to know if they ended up in good hands; some of them he would not have sold at any price. This explains why his estate at Seebiill was not only remarkably large but also of a high standard. It is not a collects ion of accidental left-overs, nor largely made up of late works. The painter’s bequest is representative of his whole work. Among it are many chefs d'oeuvre and many paintings that had never previously been exhibited” (Martin Urban, Emil Nolde, Catalogue raisonné of the Oil Paintings, vol. I, London, 1987, p.9).

After 1956, in keeping with Nolde’s will, the artist’s estate sold several paintings to establish the Nolde Stiftung Seebüll Museum. Meer E subsequently entered the collects ion of Lloyd and Margit Cotsen. Lloyd, who served as the president and chairman of Neutrogena, was also an avid archaeologist. In 1999, the UCLA Institute of Archaeology honored his longt.mes support by changing its name to the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. The Cotsens’ wide-ranging collects ion included superb examples of early Expressionism, including Alexei von Jawlensky’s early Mädchenkopf (lot 367), alongside magnificent collects ions of textiles, books, medieval art, Japanese baskets and Chinese mirrors. Material from the Cotsen collects ion can be found at Princeton University, the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, among other institutions.