About this work
- **Title (German):** *Sitzendes Mädchen mit schwarzem Hut und Blume in der rechten Hand* / *Girl with black hat* (*Mädchen mit schwarzem Hut*)
**Date:** 1903
**Medium:** Tempera on canvas
**Location:** Private collection
**Context:** Painted at Worpswede, the year Modersohn-Becker also made her second extended stay in Paris, where she deepened her engagement with Cézanne and Gauguin.
A girl sits for us in the quiet authority of a dark hat — black against what Modersohn-Becker's palette of 1903 typically rendered in warm ochres, muted earth tones, and the deep, contemplative greens of northern Germany. Executed in tempera on canvas, the work belongs to the genre of portraiture and carries the hallmarks of Modersohn-Becker's singular approach to her young sitters: her portraits of children are notable for their absence of all sentimentality and idealization. The girl holds a flower in her right hand — a gesture that reads less as decoration than as offering, or perhaps private ritual. The physiognomies in works like this have been strongly reduced in favor of a strictly constructed picture whole, the sitter made monumental through simplification rather than embellishment. What meets the eye first is the hat: wide, dark, decisive — a formal anchor around which the softer elements of flower and face quietly revolve.
Modersohn-Becker returned to Paris in 1903, and this painting belongs to that pivotal year — a moment when she became an ardent enthusiast of the painting of Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne. Back in Worpswede between and after those Paris stays, she chose the impoverished villagers as her models, primarily young girls and the elderly from the local poorhouse, the only individuals available because they were not at work in the fields.
She was interested in capturing the inner expression of the people around her and used a limited palette of earth colours in the style of the Dutch Golden Age. The flower in the girl's hand is characteristic of Modersohn-Becker's recurring instinct to place her figures in symbolic relation to nature — flowers and fruit were already included in her compositions as symbols of fertility. At the same time, the year 1903 was one in which she wrote: "I feel a burning desire to become grand in simplicity" — a declaration this painting fulfils.
This is a work for a space that earns its quiet. It rewards rooms with natural light and walls that don't compete — linen, plaster, muted stone — where the painting's earthy palette can breathe and its subject's directness can land without distraction.
