Paula Modersohn-Becker discovered her artistic talent at an early age and followed her inner calling to become a painter. At first, she completed the teacher training her father had wanted her to pursue, but in her spare time she painted and drew, and in the spring of 1896 she finally enrolled in a course taught by Jeanne Bauck at the Drawing and Painting School of the Berlin Association of Female Artists and Art Lovers, which led to a one-and-a-half-year training program. Through travel and visits to museums and galleries, she became acquainted with the great masters of European art history and deepened her love of painting. In 1897, she noted in her journal, like in a conversation with herself: “You are alive, lucky you, living intensely—that is to say: you paint. Yes, if it weren’t for painting?!” (Exhibition catalog Paula Modersohn-Becker in Bremen. Die Gemälde aus den drei Sammlungen, Bremen 1996, p. 30)

During a summer stay the following year, she learned about an artists' colony in Worpswede, near Bremen, founded in 1889. Shortly thereafter—in the year this work was created—she decided to move to the small village in the middle of the Teufelsmoor together with the sculptor Clara Westhoff. The Worpswede painter Fritz Mackensen regularly provided the artists with inspiration and feedback, leaving them free to find their own models for their works. Most residents worked in the fields during the day or were engaged in peat extraction in the bog, yet the artists frequently managed to persuade young girls and elderly residents of the poorhouse to sit for them in exchange for payment. Paula Becker painted, among others, the little Meta Fijol, “with her small, pious St. Cecilia face”, whom she described as a “small, energetic little person” (quoted from: Paula Modersohn-Becker. Catalogue raisonné of hand drawings, vol. I Single sheets, Munich 2023. p. 199). Paula Becker also portrayed the youthful temperament of the girl shown here with honesty and immediacy, casting a tender and understanding gaze. Perhaps somewhat bored by sitting still for so long and also a little insecure, she hides her chin behind the collar of her blouse.

The young Paula Becker soon became emancipated from the other artists in Worpswede, including Fritz Mackensen, Otto Modersohn, Hans am Ende, and Fritz Overbeck. The male artists painted idealized depictions of the locals and their surroundings, always maintaining a certain distance. Paula Becker, on the other hand, observed her subjects with an open mind, directly and without fear or prejudice. She mingled with them, talked to them, and thus bridged the gap with the people she painted—a quality that became impressively evident in her sensitive drawings and paintings from those early years. [CH]