Old Peasant Woman

Old Peasant Woman from 1903, at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, belongs to the sequence of portraits of elderly rural women that represent some of Modersohn-Becker's most enduring achievement. These old women — residents of Worpswede and the surrounding villages whom she drew and painted repeatedly — became for her emblematic of a direct relationship to physical reality that she associated with the peasant experience. She painted them without sentimentality and without condescension, approaching their worn faces with a reverence that has nothing to do with picturesque rusticity.

The face of the old woman is treated as the primary pictorial subject — the painting has almost no background, placing the weathered face against a minimal surround. The paint is applied with a directness that matches the directness of the observation.