About the work

The young Walter Bertelsmann was initially employed as an authorised representative and travelling salesman in his father’s tobacco company and took drawing lessons in his free time. From 1902 on, he dedicated himself entirely to painting and was a student of Hans am Ende in Worpswede until 1904. He lived as an artist of the second generation of the Worpswede artist colony until his death. Walter Bertelsmann, who became famous as a "water painter”, is just as much a painter of the sky, which also occupies the most space in this painting.

The variously coloured brush strokes provide impressionistic emphases in the representation of clouds and wind. White, light blue, brown and green strokes of paint coalesce to form a dynamic pictorial entirety, in which the trees rising above the low horizon in the distance join earth and sky. The Überschwemmung in der Hammeniederung (Flood in the Hammeniederung) is a typical painting of the landscape painter Walter Bertelsmann, in the later paintings of whom the intense interest in French Impressionism becomes clear. Bertelsmann’s motifs represent an important northern German contribution to German Impressionism in their atmospherically dense disposition and their animated brushwork.