About this work
*Young Girl with Straw Hat and a Flower in Her Hand* (original German title: *Kopf eines jungen Mädchens mit Strohhut und Blume in der erhobenen Hand*) was painted in 1902 and is one of the most quietly arresting portraits of Modersohn-Becker's early maturity. The composition is characteristically close and frontal — the girl's face and raised hand fill the canvas with an intimacy that feels almost confrontational. A simple straw hat frames her features, and one hand is lifted to hold a single flower, a gesture that is at once childlike and strangely ceremonial. The palette is drawn from Modersohn-Becker's characteristic range of ochres, browns, and deep greens — warm, earthy tones rooted in the northern European tradition — yet the flesh tones carry a luminous softness against the flattened background. By comparison to other portraits of children through the ages, her young girls are older, sadder, more serious, and not beautiful as they stare out into the distant beyond — and this girl is no exception. Her expression holds the viewer without sentimentality, neither performing innocence nor inviting pity.
In the two years following her marriage to Otto Modersohn in 1901, Becker tried to combine her responsibilities as wife, housewife, and stepmother with her artistic ambitions, setting up a small studio on a nearby farm where she went to paint for several hours a day — and it was during this period that a series of paintings of children was created.
Painting young girls, by contrast to her older subjects, was a recurring preoccupation; she was interested in the progression of girlhood through to womanhood and the different challenges encountered along the way.
The Worpswede peasant women and the old women and children from the poorhouse had become her favourite models , and works from this period — painted while she was still absorbing the lessons of her first Paris visits — show her beginning to push beyond Worpswede naturalism toward a more monumental simplicity. Here we witness a style which, although inspired by the lineage of Post-Impressionism, is steadily becoming the artist's own.
These portrayals are always compassionate but never sentimental; fundamentally, she was always concerned with rendering her models in a clear manner. As a print, this work rewards living with over time — it belongs in a space where it can be encountered unhurriedly: a reading room, a study, a bedroom wall where light shifts through the day. A child, in Paula's view, embodied special qualities, possessing a clarity of sensation that adult artists should strive to achieve — and that clarity radiates from this canvas, giving the image a gravity that transcends its modest subject. It speaks to a viewer drawn to work that resists prettiness in favour of truth, and it carries that particular northern European still
