The painting’s genesis dates to a summer vacation that Feininger and his wife, Julia, took in 1922, when Walter Gropius invited them, along with Wassily Kandinsky and his wife, Nina, to his vacation home at Timmendorfer Strand on the Baltic Sea. There Feininger encountered striking cloud formations, with which he had been fascinated since he first drew the clouds above the island of Rügen in 1901. Twenty-one years later, as he sketched the clouds above the Baltic, he had a breakthrough, as the art historian Werner Timm noted: “The time had come for spacious, transcendental pictures of sea and sky.”

On September 9, 1922, Feininger wrote to Julia, who had already returned to Weimar, that he “began to vibrate” capturing the scene before him in a number of studies of the beach and its clouds. “The changing weather conditions,” he wrote, “the interest with which one studies every mood and retains in oneself the experience, is what makes the stay at the sea so rich. I feel so many pictures arising in my imagination, and I have so much longing after realizing these visions.”

On April 13, 1923, Feininger used his sketches from that day to make an ink drawing also called Die Insel (The Island). In the prismatic composition, he depicts a strip of beach in front of the sea, where a tiny lone figure stands. A triangular island appears in the distance, and massed clouds press down on the scene from the sky above.

In July of that year, he translated his drawing into a charming watercolor painted in Nina Kandinsky’s notebook as a memento of their summer together.

It was likely around the spring of 1923 when Feininger also started the painting. With translucent planes of color, he painted the sea, sky, and distant island in shades of blue and green, the strip of beach in cool yellows, and the gigantic clouds in greys and browns. The isolated figure from the drawing reappears in the painting as a tiny, angular black sliver, reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea), 1808–1810. Both artists’ paintings convey an awe of nature.

Two years after completing Die Insel, Feininger returned to the motif in an ink and watercolor drawing titled, Lübecker Bucht (Bay of Lübeck), 1925. By then, he had begun spending summers in Deep, a fishing village on the Baltic Sea, where he continued to admire the clouds. As he wrote to Julia of his first visit to Deep, in 1924: “Yesterday evening or late afternoon I suddenly experienced my ‘cloud’ [of Die Insel]…in exactly those colors!”