Girl with Lamb

Girl with Lamb from 1904 combines the child subject with an animal companion in a pastoral image that was part of a tradition stretching back through the Worpswede colony to German Romanticism. The lamb in particular has sacred associations — it appears in Christian iconography as the Agnus Dei — but Modersohn-Becker likely valued it primarily as a pastoral motif rather than a specifically religious symbol. Her treatment of animal and child as equally part of the natural world, neither sentimentalized, gives the image a quality of quiet power. The painting's current location is unspecified.

The girl and lamb are composed as a single compact mass, both simplified into rounded, organic forms. The relationship between child and animal is expressed through their physical closeness and shared simplification of form rather than through any expressive gesture.