Seated Old Peasant Woman

By 1903 the artists' colony at Worpswede, out in the marshes north of Bremen, had made its name painting the local peasants as picturesque country types. Modersohn-Becker wanted something plainer. She found many of her models in the village poorhouse, among the old and the poor, and returned to the same faces season after season. This old woman she sets down seated and motionless, her simplified hands folded in her lap. There is no attempt to prettify her hard life, and yet she is given a stillness and dignity that her place in the world would rarely have allowed. The whole picture is held in a narrow band of earth browns and muted greens, the palette of the old Dutch masters Modersohn-Becker had been studying.