The human figure is at the heart of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s relatively small artistic legacy, cut short by her untimely death. Alongside her self-portraits, she is particularly well known for her prized portraits of children, to which she devoted herself beginning in 1898, after moving to the artists’ colony of Worpswede.

Before the creation of the present painting, the artist drew several preliminary sketches of a seated girl with a hat, holding a flower in her hand, which bear witness to Modersohn-Becker’s intensive compositional exploration of this motif (cf. Catalogue Raisonné of Hand Drawings, nos. E IV/130–E IV/133). In some respects, the girl resembles the artist’s stepdaughter, Elsbeth Modersohn (1898–1984)—who was about five years old at the time—Otto Modersohn’s daughter from his first marriage, who occasionally posed for the artist’s drawings and paintings. The artist also explores this motif in several paintings, including “Bust of a Girl with a Blue Hat and a Flower in Her Right Hand” (c. 1903, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California) and the work offered here (see Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, nos. 392–394). A little later, another painting with this motif was created, “Head of a Blonde Girl with a Straw Hat” (ca. 1904, Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal).

In the years around 1903–04, Modersohn-Becker typically applied the paint in thick layers, scraping the paint with the brush handle to create a relief-like surface that starkly contrasts with the children's faces. In keeping with the artist’s artistic principles and her pursuit of simplification, the head and body are no longer clearly defined; the facial features become de-individualized, schematized, blurred, and reduced to flat planes: “The great simplicity of form—that is something wonderful. I have always strived to imbue the heads I painted or drew with the simplicity of nature. [...] Forehead, eyes, mouth, nose, cheeks, chin—that's all. It sounds so simple, and yet it is so incredibly much.” (Journal entry, February 1903, quote from: Günter Busch and Liselotte von Reinken (eds.), Paula Modersohn-Becker in Briefen und Tagebüchern, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 140)

In her depictions, Modersohn-Becker eschewed a genre-like, idealized, even Angelic portrayal of the children, instead developing a distinctive visual language that captures the essence of her subjects. With her characteristic rich palette, the artist created an image of intimacy and closeness, of stillness and distance, of darkness and soft light. Thus, “Paula Modersohn [...] took several significant strides ahead of the development of modern art in her short life, even before the founders of the new artistic language of Expressionism or Cubism were able to articulate themselves in a corresponding form.” (Günter Busch, Paula Modersohn-Becker. Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, vol. I, Munich 1998, p. 3) [CH]