Paula Modersohn-Becker was born in 1876. She was able to synthesize some of the most powerful elements of 19th century realism and 20th century expressionism into an extremely personal style. For the most part, her parents were very supportive of her. In 1896 they managed to send her to the Drawing and Painting School of the Society of Berlin Women Artists and to pay for additional lessons by taking in a boarder. She spent the summer of 1897 in the countryside near their Bremen home at Worpswede, a rural colony of artists with back-to-nature goals and ideals similar to those of the French Barbizon group.

It was at Worpswede that she met Otto Modersohn, a well-known painter eleven years her senior, who was later to become her husband....