signed lower left. Verso inscribed on the stretcher 'Emil Nolde: Sonnenblumen Abend II'.
The painting combines the two dominating themes of Nolde's oeuvre: the wide, flat landscape of Schleswig-Holstein with its rapid changes of weather and dramatic cloud formations , and the flowers he loved so much. Among these, the sunflower is the one he portrayed most frequently.
Martin Gosebruch wrote in the book "Nolde, Aquarelle und Zeichnungen" (Nolde, Watercolours and Drawings), published in 1957 by the Stiftung Seebüll Ada und Emil Nolde:
"Surely it is completely Nolde's disposition to wish the invulnerable beauty of flowers into a grandiose and one-sided landscape, seamlessly, like the heavenly pollen, and to draw nourishment from it for himself and his art, but that does not make him a flower painter. Flowers were able to communicate to him something besides mere beauty, if we just think of the giant wheels of the sunflowers he often painted. What is shown is not the stem of the flower, the path of her growth, the clarity of the shape of the bloom, but the powerful dark eye of the core and, like the surge of an overflowing fount, the mass of yellow. Collection is given and warm radiance…[…]."
