August Lüdecke-Cleve was born in 1868 in the German-Dutch border region of the Lower Rhine. After studying at the academies in Düsseldorf and Munich, he settled in the latter city in 1901. Here, he added "Cleve" to his surname because a painter working there at the time was still working under the name August Lüdecke. Lüdecke-Cleve was an Impressionist landscape painter. He painted many farm landscapes, often large-scale. Examples include meadows with brightly colored cattle and plowing horses, which he painted in vibrant colors. Between 1906 and 1926, Lüdecke-Cleve also made several trips to the Netherlands, primarily to paint the blooming bulb fields. The painting in the De Witte Zwaan collection depicts a nursery near Noordwijk: the tulips have been cut and the flowers are on a barge, ready to be transported. During his stay in the Netherlands, Lüdecke-Cleve made studies of the bulb fields, which he transformed into his final paintings in his Munich studio. A color study of the punt with topped tulips is in a private collection. The painter made two smaller copies of this painting in the late 1920s.