Autoportrait pour le sixième anniversaire de mariage

Paula Modersohn-Becker painted this in Paris in the spring of 1906, and as far as anyone knows it was something no woman had done before: paint herself nude. She stands stripped to the waist, an amber necklace at her throat, hands resting below a rounded belly, looking as though she is expecting a child. She was not. She had recently left her husband back in Germany and gone to Paris alone to paint, and the swelling body seems to be about her own fertility and ambition as an artist rather than a real pregnancy. The next year she did become pregnant, returned to her marriage, and gave birth in November 1907. Weeks later, at 31, she died of an embolism. She had made more than 700 paintings, most of them barely seen in her lifetime.