This is an unpublished, unillustrated essay (read it with an internet connection, to see the images that are discussed). It concerns the German expressionist painter Emil Nolde, and his conceptualization of color. Nolde's color choices were not consistently anti-naturalistic, but neither were they symbolic or otherwise programmatic. The essay is an attempt to understand how he thought of color, using late nineteenth-century German realist painting and early twentieth-sentury German expressionist poetry as points of comparison.