Girl with blue-white chain in her hair

Paula Modersohn-Becker's 1903 study of a girl with a blue-white chain in her hair belongs to her series of closely observed child portraits from the Worpswede community, in which the faces and ornamental details of village children are rendered with the same monumental simplicity she brought to her mature figure subjects. The decorative detail of the chain in the hair — a small but distinctive ornament — is handled with the significance Modersohn-Becker granted to all the specifics of her subjects' appearance: not charming genre detail but a fact of the person's physical reality. The Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal holds this as part of its modern German collection.

The child's face is rendered with Modersohn-Becker's characteristic simplified planes — broad tonal areas establishing the underlying structure of the face, with the chain providing a small decorative counterpoint to the monumental simplicity of the figure. The blue-white colors of the chain are precisely observed against the warm skin tone, creating a quiet chromatic accent.