Worpswede began as a rebellion. In 1889 a handful of young painters, tired of the academies and their studio light, moved to a village in the Teufelsmoor, the Devil's Moor, north of Bremen, to paint what they saw: black peat canals, birch trees, huge skies, and people who cut turf for a living. Fritz Mackensen, Otto Modersohn, Fritz Overbeck, Heinrich Vogeler and, a few years later, the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker made the village a household name among art lovers, and the colony they founded grew into something like a small, permanent festival of the arts.
Today Worpswede is a village of around nine thousand people, with galleries, craft shops, studios and museums spread along a single winding main street. Vogeler's house, the Barkenhoff, with its white gables and garden, is open as a museum, and some of the buildings are experimental creations from the early twentieth century, with strange rooflines and expressionist brickwork. The village sits on a low hill, the Weyerberg, which at fifty-odd metres counts as a mountain in this flat land, and from its top you can see the moor stretching away in every direction.
The moor is the real subject. Reed-fringed canals, flat meadows and tall pale sky make a landscape of quiet drama, especially in early morning when mist rises off the water and the cranes call. The roads around Worpswede are narrow and straight, running along drainage ditches, with sudden bends where they cross a canal. Surfaces can be patchy, because peat soil sinks, so keep an eye out for dips and ripples. On weekends the village is thick with day-trippers and cyclists, and you will do better on a weekday.
Fuel is available in Worpswede and in Lilienthal, nearly nine kilometres away, which is a bigger town with supermarkets. The cafés along the main street do a good coffee and a slab of cake, and some serve a local speciality, a sweet bread with raisins. Give yourself an hour for the galleries, because the paintings are the best explanation of why the place looks the way it does.