Watercolour painting has always played a special role in the life’s work of the 87-year-old artist Ivo Hauptmann. Although his watercolours were mostly created in front of nature, they were never just sketches or nature studies, but independent and pictorial. This is because Hauptmann’s watercolour technique differs from virtuoso fluid watercolour painting in that it features firmly drawn outlines as the supporting framework for the colour values. It is above all in his watercolours that Hauptmann deals with various types of landscape. Harbour motifs and depictions of the beach on the North Sea and Baltic Sea as well as cityscapes are frequently found in his oeuvre as a whole.