Boy with Cat

In February 1903 Modersohn-Becker was in Paris for the second time, looking hard at the ancient sculpture in the Louvre. In her diary she wrote that the great simplicity of form was something wonderful, and that she now felt deeply how much she could learn from the heads of antiquity. Back in Worpswede, the artists' village near Bremen, she went on painting the children of the local farming families, and this boy, dated to around 1903, shows that lesson brought home. He stands close to us against a bare brownish wall, in a black cap and a dark jacket, holding a white cat with dark patches. There is no attempt to make him sweet. His face is given plainly and seriously, the way she painted the village's old women. After her death the picture stayed with her husband, the painter Otto Modersohn, until a museum in Hannover acquired it in 1913. Confiscated there in 1937, it came to Basel two years later through the Berlin dealer Karl Buchholz.