Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) was the first German painter to assimilate the Post-Impressionist currents she discovered for herself in Paris and to forge a very personal style, creating some unquestioned masterpieces during her brief career.

Paula Becker was born on February 8, 1876, into a cultured middle-class family in Dresden which moved to Bremen in 1888. Her father, a government railroad official in early retirement and failing health and concerned about his six children's financial security, insisted that the young Paula complete a two-year teachers' training program before allowing her to study at the school for women artists in Berlin. In September 1898 she settled in the nearby artists' colony of Worpswede to work with its celebrated figure painter, Fritz Mackensen. The Worpswede peasant women, often with their infants, and the old women and children from the poor house became her favorite models, and she recorded the picturesque landscape, the dark moors and...