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Travelling broadens the mind. This sentence goes particularly for Paul Klee and his journeys to the South. Travelling meant for Klee, who lived a very well-ordered life in everyday life, first of all adventure. Klee made a first trip to Italy during his student days in Munich in 1901, which made him particularly aware of the art of the Renaissance. Much more decisive became a journey to North-Africa in spring 1914, the so-called "Journey to Tunis", which Klee made together with the painters Macke and Moilliet. During this trip, Klee became a painter, as he noted it down in his diary on April 16th 1914. In 1926, the Bauhaus had to move for political reasons from Weimar to Dessau, city to which Klee could not get acclimatized. At that time, which initiated his separation from the Bauhaus, searching for change and new stimulations, Klee made trips again to the Mediterranean world after a long time.
At the end of July 1927, Klee met his son Felix on the Côte d'Azur. In a letter dated August 10th, Paul Klee — obviously excited before the journey — announced to his wife his voyage from the Ile de Porquerolles to Corsica: "Friday evening, I go to Toulon, there, a ship arrives from Marseille in the evening and takes me to the blue waters, soon, it is getting dark, but the full moon is shining, and I breathe out the last bit of strain. There, the new begins, probably not new at all, but coloured a little differently. And the colouring makes it, that is what I am searching again and again: to waken tones, which slumber inside me, a small and a big adventure in colour." In the gouache Abenteurer zur See (Adventurer to sea) from 1927, Klee seems to have intensified this travelling feeling. Approximately in the middle of the picture, in nightly weaving blue, there is an admiral in uniform, waiting for the departure, whose physiognomy reminds of Klee's lithographic self-portrait Versunkenheit, painted in 1919. Around the seaman, there are numerous smaller and larger sailing ships with different coloured flags and signal flags. Dominating the red full moon — like a sundown — which matches in its cinnabar wonderfully with the magical blue.